Sun Products Finds Speed to Value

Sun Products may be fairly new in name, but it's a company backed by a strong legacy of brands, products and leadership. Formed in September 2008 with the merger of Huish Detergents, Inc. and the Unilever North American Laundry Care business, Sun Products is the No. 2 provider of laundry detergent and fabric softeners in North America with annual sales of more than $2 billion. In addition to manufacturing well-known national brands, Sun Products is also the private label laundry manufacturing partner for the majority of North American retailers.

 

Soon after the company's formation, its IT team, led by CIO Fred Squires, worked alongside Sun Products' users to select vendors for mission-critical systems, including supply chain planning and fulfillment applications. The team needed to transition its national brands' business from the technical-service agreement that Sun Products had with Unilever and establish a new IT environment by June 1, 2009.

 

This would entail replacing every software system, including a combination of packaged and proprietary applications, in a five-month time frame.Magnifying this challenge was the fact that Sun Products had only three IT employees based in Connecticut in a temporary office at the time of the merger. The company did not have a corporate building or any physical space to put all of the hardware and servers required to run the new systems.

 

"We decided that a managed services approach was the best choice for handling our looming deadline and ongoing day-to-day IT requirements. It would enable us to stay focused on our core business strengths while we trusted our vendors to do the same,"says Joe Manco, director, IT business applications at Sun Products.

 

Based on positive endorsements from Sun Products' users who had used JDA Demand andJDA Fulfillment applications since 1994, the company initiated discussions with the software provider in October 2008. Having it host the applications would mean that Sun Products no longer had to deal with disaster recovery, business continuity, managing upgrades and patches. The IT team also didn't need to bring on board a staff of database administrators or IT technicians. In addition to JDA Demand and JDA Fulfillment, the manufacturer licensed JDA Space Planning, JDA Trade Promotions Management, JDA Reporting and JDA Market Manager to replace its highly customized, proprietary systems.

 

"The fact that we don't have to worry about these applications from an IT perspective made our choice even easier,"sysid Manco.

 

Following the selection process, the Sun Products team worked diligently on an implementation plan. While most companies generally take 10 to 12 months for an implementation of this magnitude, the team had less than five months to roll out the solutions.

 

"We had a strong, cohesive team in place -- which included Sun associates and our vendor partners, which were onsite for most of the project. Communication, team meetings, project plan management were all part of the success. Everyone was on the same page and understood the challenge and the goal,"says Manco.

 

He continues: "On the scheduled go-live data, we were able to take an order from a customer, process that order, ship it and submit an invoice -- all without the customer ever knowing that we had just experienced a major transition.

 

Other benefits that Sun Products is realizing as a result of using managed services include:

-- Avoiding a hefty capital investment along with all of the ongoing costs associated with software, maintenance, network and infrastructure upgrades

-- Gaining innovative capabilities, fast response times and strong performance

-- Securing an infrastructure with the flexibility to scale to support a complex, multi-modal global network

 

Sun Products also benefitted from a simplified, one-stop shopping experience. The company has since returned to JDA for additional supply chain capabilities that seamlessly integrate with other planning and optimization solutions. In addition, Sun Products' IT team members, many of whom are business analysts, are better able to stay focused on servicing customers instead of dealing with maintenance, upgrades, patches, disaster recovery, security and business-continuity issues.

 

Words of Wisdom

"Organize your 'A-team'. Don't let consultants/outsiders convince you that it can't be done. Prepare a project plan, assign a project manager, schedule weekly (in some cases, daily) meetings and calls and test, test, test." --Joe Manco, Director, IT Business Applications, Sun Products