Munchkin Gives Its Line of Children’s Products Plenty of Room to Grow in an Upgraded Enterprise Application Environment
 
 

Munchkin Gives Its Line of Children’s Products Plenty of Room to Grow in an Upgraded Enterprise Application Environment

  • Oracle Customer:  Munchkin Inc.
    Location:  North Hills, California
    Industry:  Consumer Goods
    Employees:  230
    Annual Revenue:  $100 to $500 Million

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A privately held, global company, Munchkin Inc. creates baby and toddler products that make life easier for today’s parents. Founded in 1991, Munchkin places great emphasis on innovation, redefining what baby products can achieve. The company has won more than 40 industry awards, including multiple wins of the coveted Target Corporation Partner Award of Excellence, the United Kingdom-based ASDA Stores partnership award, and the Toys “R” Us 2011 Vendor of the Year award.

The company has grown rapidly, posting more than a 20% year-over-year increase in revenue for the last five years. During that time, it has expanded its product lines, markets, manufacturing operations, and retail partner base. Today, Munchkin manufacturers many of its products in Asia, counts the world’s leading retailers as its customers, operates numerous distribution centers around the world, and processes 90% of its orders via electronic data interchange (EDI). The company found that it required an upgraded enterprise resource planning system to meet emerging needs related to its increasingly global operations.

Munchkin first deployed Oracle E-Business Suite in 2004 and upgraded to Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 to benefit from new functionality, such as multiple-organization hierarchies, subledger accounting, and expanded intercompany transactional capabilities. It also wanted to remain current on support for its vital enterprise applications. Further, Munchkin looked to create an optimal environment for deploying Oracle’s Hyperion enterprise performance management applications and, later, Oracle Fusion Applications.

Today, the juvenile-product manufacturer is taking advantage of Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 to reduce customizations, further accelerate and enhance business process efficiency, improve warehouse management, and streamline financial management across the global company.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Munchkin Inc.

  • “By upgrading to Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1, we have a highly scalable and robust enterprise application environment that will continue to grow along with our company. Our Oracle applications are true innovation enablers that will continue to help us transform the child-product space.” – Philippe Brisset, Senior Director of IT, Munchkin Inc.

  • Ensure that the global manufacturer’s enterprise applications can continue to support it as the company posts 20% year-over-year annual growth, enters new global markets, manages manufacturers worldwide, and grows relationships with large retailers, who increasingly require EDI transactions
  • Simplify back-office operations by eliminating complex and difficult-to-maintain customizations
  • Improve agility in serving retail customers and getting the company’s growing portfolio of children’s products to market
  • Ensure that the company remains on a current Oracle E-Business Suite release to avoid extended support costs

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Upgraded to Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 to ensure that the company is on a widely-supported version of the enterprise applications on which it runs its global consumer product business, avoiding extended support costs
  • Benefitted from subledger accounting and multiple-organization functionality in Oracle Financials to gain a more granular view of US and international operations and more efficiently manage them in the system
  • Enabled the company to more easily manage multiple currencies, ledgers, and inventory locations―accelerating financial close processes
  • Expanded Munchkin’s use of radio-frequency devices for receiving and shipping―further streamlining warehouse operations and accuracy, as well as solidifying relationships with retail partners
  • Boosted productivity with the ability to locate and manage customer data more efficiently, thanks to improved interfaces and navigation
  • Improved ability to efficiently meet big-box retailer requirements related to EDI transactions
  • Reduced customizations, compared to the legacy environment, including the item master, and is on track to retire up to 50 major customizations, positioning the company to cut IT management burden and costs moving forward
  • Improved ability to efficiently manage complex information about customers and partners, including organizations, locations, and the network of hierarchical relationships among them, thanks to Oracle Trading Community Architecture
  • Retired a third-party application for producing purchase orders and bills, thanks to Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher―which is part of Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1―reducing IT complexity and costs associated with licensing and maintaining the system
  • Improved ability to manage international operations and facilitate entry into new markets with multicurrency and multi-organizational capabilities, as well as Oracle E-Business Tax, which provides a turnkey infrastructure for transaction-tax knowledge management
  • Replaced multiple and very large budget spreadsheets that were difficult to manage and prone to document corruption and version-control issues for faster and more accurate planning, thanks to Oracle Hyperion Planning
  • Gained drill-down functionality for greater insight into budgets and planning, as well as enabled auditing capabilities―helping managers to identify when and who made updates and changes to planning documents and view the details associated with the changes
  • Ensured that the company’s planning system could integrate with Oracle E-Business Suite to improve data accuracy and avoid rekeying data

Why Oracle

Munchkin worked with Hitachi Consulting to plan and execute the upgrade, in conjunction with Munchkin’s hosting provider. The project, which involved upgrading a single instance of Oracle E-Business Suite across the company’s global operations, took approximately six months and came in on budget. Munchkin’s strategy was to use existing Oracle E-Business Suite 11i functionality in the Release 12 environment and take advantage of new features and functionality on an as-needed basis, without jeopardizing the go-live date.

Partner

“As Hitachi Consulting is a member of the Oracle Partner Network, we selected the firm as our Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 upgrade partner. The group has numerous Oracle specializations, and its Release 12 experience, technical expertise, staffing model, and understanding of our needs and expectations helped set the stage for us to continue reaping the benefits of our Oracle E-Business Suite investment for years to come,” said Philippe Brisset, senior director of IT, Munchkin Inc.