Oracle Customer Success—Baxters Food Group

Baxters Food Group is a family-owned food manufacturer, well-known in the United Kingdom for its soups, preserves, condiments, and chutneys. The organization has grown through acquisition and now has manufacturing and distribution facilities in the United Kingdom, USA, Poland, Canada, and Australia. In 2014 Baxters doubled the size of its business by acquiring Wornick Foods in the United States which manufactures ration packs for the U.S. military.

As a growing global business, Baxters needed the right tools in place to manage the business efficiently and effectively, and to unlock more value from its data. The team previously used a combination of legacy on-premise Hyperion Essbase systems and complicated Excel models for gross margin planning, forecasting, and budgeting, which were time-consuming and prone to errors. The company’s business units in Canada and Australia projected forecasting offline.

To support its growth, Baxters chose cloud-based planning and business intelligence solutions to enable its small IT team to deliver maximum value to the business. By opting for off-the-shelf cloud-based solutions, the team will no longer need to spend time managing infrastructure and upgrades.

Oracle Planning and Budgeting Cloud Service provides the company with a reliable and secure solution. With planning and budgeting performed in the cloud, there is now a single process for the whole organization, including Australia and Canada, helping to improve the accuracy of plans and forecasts. Baxters also has eliminated the use of cumbersome offline files and complex Excel models for profit and loss, balance sheet and cash flow planning.

With Oracle Business Analytics Foundation Suite, along with prebuilt content including Oracle Financial Analytics, Oracle Supply Chain Analytics, and Oracle Procurement and Spend Analytics, information is delivered in a modern format that executives can readily use to make more informed decisions faster. Data is automatically fed into the planning system from Baxters’ financial, enterprise resource planning, and business intelligence systems, which allows the business to plan and forecast against actuals.

Baxters can more accurately forecast sales of its branded and partner-owned brands by market, customer, product category, brand and individual product line. Further analysis will help the organization run more efficiently, reduce stock wastage, and cut overhead.

Baxters will add Oracle Manufacturing Analytics to its suite of analytics solutions, once it completes its global upgrade of Oracle E-Business Suite. Baxters will subsequently migrate its US business onto the cloud-based planning and business intelligence solutions to complete the process of bringing its global businesses into a single cloud-based system.