ConAgra Foods, Inc. Reduces Operational Costs and Complexity and Makes Costs More Visible with Streamlined Transportation Management System
 
 

ConAgra Foods, Inc. Reduces Operational Costs and Complexity and Makes Costs More Visible with Streamlined Transportation Management System

  • Oracle Customer:  ConAgra Foods, Inc.
    Location:  Omaha, Nebraska, United States
    Industry:  Consumer Goods
    Employees:  23,200
    Annual Revenue:  Over $5 Billion

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ConAgra Foods, Inc. is one of North America’s leading food companies and is the trusted name behind many leading branded and private-label consumer food products. ConAgra Foods also has a strong business-to-business presence in its commercial foods segment, which provides food products to restaurants and other foodservice establishments. The company offers a wide variety of snacks, meals, and ingredients. Some of its brands include Healthy Choice, Marie Calendar, Hunts, Orville Redenbacher, and Peter Pan peanut butter.

While a leader in both the consumer and commercial food production industries, ConAgra Foods was challenged to optimize the raw materials transportation processes across its various production facilities and warehouses. Its complex legacy systems were expensive to maintain and did not provide the cross-business cost visibility the company desired. After selecting Oracle Transportation Management and implementing the solution across its consumer business, ConAgra Foods has improved visibility into its transportation processes and analyzed performance of inbound and outbound transportation—revealing opportunities to consolidate truck loads, negotiate stronger contracts, and reduce costs. Further, ConAgra Foods has decommissioned major components of its siloed legacy system, achieving cost savings, and enabling the company to roll out the solution to other business segments, internationally.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from ConAgra Foods, Inc.

  • “Implementing Oracle Transportation Management system is just the first step in transforming our enterprise transportation. The system shines a light on opportunities that were not previously visible and enables us to streamline our partnerships and transportation processes for enhanced efficiency and significant savings.” – Melissa Kramer, IT Program Director, ConAgra Foods, Inc.

  • Enable the company to accurately allocate freight costs for all materials hauled
  • Streamline and standardize freight settlement
  • Extend visibility of freight activity across the enterprise for greater insight into costs and profitability across the company’s various food manufacturing groups
  • Gain a more accurate view of transportation costs for each finished food product shipped, as well as raw materials received

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Implemented Oracle Transportation Management across the company’s consumer business to establish an enterprisewide solution that helps streamline food shipment processes and better allocate transportation and personnel resources
  • Improved transportation service provider selection methodology resulting in more accurate transportation rate management and commitments
  • Automated the connection between the enterprise resource planning system and transportation management system, eliminating manual efforts associated with entering orders for raw food as well as packaging materials for transportation to various facilities
  • Gained visibility into freight spending, enabling the company to quickly see where it can achieve the greatest cost savings on food product shipments and better negotiate contracts with vendors and suppliers
  • Set the stage to improve load consolidation opportunities for reducing costs and improving service-provider partnerships
  • Allocated materials transportation costs more accurately to improve visibility into profitability
  • Enabled the decommissioning of seven legacy systems and more than 12 business-maintained Access databases, streamlining business processes as well as reducing software bugs and maintenance costs
  • Improved service-provider performance monitoring and enabled self-service reporting capabilities through Oracle Fusion Transportation Intelligence
  • Improved the ability to share financial performance metrics with impacted organizations through Oracle Fusion Transportation Intelligence

Why Oracle

After evaluating four providers, the company chose Oracle Transportation Management due to the solution’s core capabilities and its out-of-the-box ability to allocate transportation costs to finished-goods materials. 

“Oracle offered a very mature solution that provided a lot of out-of-the-box capabilities. In addition, the overall total cost of ownership for the Oracle solution was the best fit for our company,” said Melissa Kramer, IT program director, ConAgra Foods, Inc.

Implementation Process

ConAgra Foods selected the Oracle solution in April 2010 and initiated the design and execution process in July 2010. With US$450 million in freight spend, on-time delivery, and service management performance at stake, ConAgra Foods decided to implement the Oracle solution in three phases: first, for all rail movement and a portion of raw materials movement; second, for the remaining finished goods movements; and third, for the remaining raw material movement. Work is underway now to roll out the solution to the flour mills segment of the business.

Partner

ConAgra Foods, Inc. worked with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to help implement the Oracle solution. After evaluating four different implementation partners, the company selected TCS because of its Oracle Transportation Management implementation capabilities, project approach, and affordability. TCS supported the entire Oracle installation process, from solution design to implementation, testing, and stabilization. It also now provides ongoing technical support for Oracle Transportation Management and Oracle Fusion Transportation Intelligence.

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