How Value-Driven AMS Benefits the Consumer Products – Food Industry
To compete in the digital era, your business needs to continuously innovate, evolve and integrate applications to achieve better business outcomes. And that’s no less true for the consumer products – food industry.
A number of business drivers remain consistent in the food industry: cutting costs, bringing products to market quickly, standing out in increasingly competitive markets and staying compliant with the large volume of regulations. In addition, maintaining the best possible methods of storing, packaging, preserving and distributing products remains a constant challenge.
As with most businesses, the digital economy is forcing the food industry to become more technology driven. So, it’s not all that surprising that the application management services (AMS) conversation is moving away from being just a focus on tactical efficiency gains to providing strategic capabilities for transformation and growth.
The AMS Value Pyramid
As businesses grow and evolve, their expectations for AMS also evolve. It’s important to look for value opportunities at every stage, from operational efficiency through to business outcomes and innovation. If your application management team is largely isolated from the rest of the business or focused purely on “keeping the lights on,” you’re likely missing out on significant opportunities for business innovation.
Forward-looking IT organizations have started to view AMS not as an isolated service, but as a capability that must be tightly linked to continuous improvement and business innovation. If you adopt this mindset, you’ll start to see the benefit opportunities along the way as your business grows.
Enhanced AMS Value for the Food Industry
Like any consumer products business, the food industry must find ways to deliver amazing customer experiences, quickly respond to new markets and adapt to changing regulations while continually looking to gain operational efficiencies.
To drive success, the IT and AMS teams must work together to investigate new technologies and trends to solve some of the challenges unique to the food industry, define the specific business opportunities they make possible and continuously deliver iterative releases of applications that advance the business.
NTT DATA Business Solutions is particularly well suited to deliver these value-driven benefits due to our experience working with clients in the meat & poultry, eggs, dairy, and bakery, confectionary and snack industries.
Why? Because our industry experts understand the subtle differences among the different food industry specialties and have developed a multitude of industry-specific solutions tailored to meet their unique needs – whether on premise, cloud or hybrid.
KPI Cockpits
Each sector of the food industry requires its own unique set of processes, and the KPIs they measure are based on the output from those unique processes. Whether it’s measuring raw milk volume per producer or associated butter fat or protein measures for the dairy industry, to throughput weights for the meat industry, we’ve developed a set of pre-built, plug ‘n play industry micro-vertical focused cockpits and dashboards that help you keep track of the metrics most important to your industry.
Industry Solution Principal
NTT DATA Business Solutions Industry Solution Principals (ISPs) are an integral part of your customer success and service delivery team, lending their extensive experience with your industry to drive value for your business. As part of an AMS engagement, your ISP will periodically review your business plans and SAP strategy, advise on industry micro-vertical trends and best practices, and work with you to identify continuous improvements and innovations to benefit the business.
NTT DATA Business Solutions Software
Working with our food industry clients, NTT DATA Business Solutions has developed a number of software solutions designed to fill gaps in standard SAP processes or to support specific industry micro-vertical processes. Imagine having access to industry-specific solutions designed to manage very specific processes such as livestock procurement, grower accounting or dairy receiving, to name a few.
Line of Business Expertise
In addition to the unique processes associated with your industry micro-vertical, every business also has the need to manage the rest of the business – from human capital, to CRM sales, service, marketing and e-commerce, to finance and analytics, to supply chain management. As an SAP platinum partner, with focused LOB delivery units, NTT DATA Business Solutions is ready to help with those needs, as well.
Advisory Services
The challenges facing your business – and your IT – are constantly changing. But you don’t always require new solutions to deal with them. What you need is an honest, detailed evaluation of your situation and an open assessment. Are you using your existing tools efficiently? Where could you prevent drops in performance, and which innovations actually make sense for you? Our advisory services can help you to realize the full potential of your SAP solution landscape by identifying the opportunities for improvements in your SAP landscape, rank-ordered against the estimated ROIs.
Reimagine AMS
As the pace of change continues to accelerate, meeting today’s expectations for innovation and growth, without sacrificing quality of service or security, takes constant attention. Our goal is to help you continuously refine your application portfolio to better support these business expectations today and in the future. We can help you build to run, run to improve and improve to change.
By combining deep industry knowledge, next-generation tools, application domain expertise and unique intellectual property (IP) solutions, our AMS can help you efficiently address today’s challenges while instituting a cultural and technical foundation that supports transformation and change.
Want to learn more?
Download our e-book, Application Managed Services (AMS) in the Digital Age: Consumer Products – Food Industry.