Alicorp
            

Alicorp was founded in 1900 as a producer of oils and soaps and has since risen to the top of Latin America’s food processing companies. It has over 150 own brands, and four established business lines. A powerhouse in the consumables market, Peru-based Alicorp has 12,000+ employees in 9 different countries and reported 3bn USD in revenue in 2020 alone.

Alicorp has worked hard over its 60 years to scale up into a now industry-dominating business. This has been achieved through hard work, organic growth and strategic acquisitions. With four business lines (consumer goods, B2B, aquaculture, and milling) Alicorp is a household name in Latin America and fast becoming a global giant. But these years of accelerated growth have taken their toll.

The company has needed to be agile. It has bought new tech solutions to solve local problems while running new applications to better serve global customers and even merge different systems after numerous acquisitions. The result? The potential for operational anarchy. But Alicorp didn’t get where it is now by being slow to react. That’s why they established an ambitious digital roadmap in 2017: The goal being to unify all technologies by 2025.

“Our business mantra is ‘Feeding the growth of tomorrow,’” says Juan Balbin. We have 60 years of commitment to our cause. But it was clear that we would not be able to keep this up without addressing the huge issue of disparate systems and processes.”

SAP migration exposes lock-in situation

So they set to work. The first major milestone that had to be achieved as part of the roadmap was a corporate-wide migration from SAP R/3® to SAP S/4HANA®. Alicorp knew this would be a huge project, but they underestimated how significant it would also be for the second part of their planned business process transformation:

“We started to look into phase two of our roadmap and quickly realized that there were few vendors out there that were genuinely open enough to integrate with SAP S/4HANA. Least of all expose the processes linked to SAP R/3 instances that were soon to be obsolete,” says Balbin.

So Alicorp searched very hard. It knew what it needed: a powerful business process management platform where engineers, designers, architects and strategic suppliers could all collaborate using a connected user interface. It wanted to be able to establish a definitive process governance system regarding roles, responsibilities and hierarchies. It wanted to manage performance through process mining functionality and optimize processes aligned to strategic KPIs. It even wanted to be able to manage operational risk and compliance. It was hard enough to find a vendor that had the technology to do all this. Let alone one independent and open enough to create the fluid flow of data between the new process architecture, the obsolete SAP R/3 instances and the new SAP S4/HANA software. So when Alicorp discovered that Software AG’s ARIS Enterprise could do it all—and came with an SAP integration solution—it knew it had found a partner of choice.

A truly connected enterprise

Alicorp got to work immediately at the core. First off, the integration with SAP® Solution Manager (SolMan) had to be set up. Where other vendors had said the task was impossible, Software AG’s ARIS communicated seamlessly with SolMan via HTTP access. The full migration across the parent Alicorp business, covering all processes, was done in under 2 years. Not bad!

In under a year and a half, all 500 users are now actively using ARIS and now share a single point of truth regarding both company and customer journeys. And Alicorp predicts that it will gain 20% more efficiency in its operations, reduce incidents, avoid expensive change requests, and be able to centrally control everything.

Procure to Pay go live in 10 weeks

And the successful use cases are rolling in—take the process mining project:

“We quickly turned our attentions to one of our major pain points—the customer journey from procurement to payments. We needed to be able to measure efficiency using KPIs aligned to our strategy. And there was the headache of the SAP S/4HANA integration to get done," says Balbin.

But Software AG’s Professional Services team were there to help. And the integration plus the entire end-to-end process visualized from procurement and accounting to payments—including all strategic dashboards—was live in just 10 weeks. “We now have 54 analytics dimensions, 41 indicators, 71 analysis favorites and 104 measures all on one ARIS dashboard. It is truly astonishing!” says Juan Balbin. “And there’s no need for our business users to request SAP reports. It’s all there.”

Feeding the growth of tomorrow

With the SAP migration nearly complete across all geographies, Alicorp is now concentrating on the other companies in the group, now feeling confident that it’s now in a position to scale excellence. And the partnership with Software AG continues to grow. With Software AG’s webMethods now being used for further complex integration projects and Alfabet for asset management, Alicorp is better placed than ever before to feed the growth of tomorrow.