The massive IT overhaul brewing at Carlsberg

Carlsberg is revamping its IT. CIO Kenneth Egelund Schmidt talks to Jo Best on why sourcing and collaboration is the right recipe

At Carlsberg IT, something is brewing.

The four-year-old Carlsberg subsidiary, set up to supply the beer maker with tech services, is in the middle of a major overhaul of the company's IT.

Having made a number of acquisitions recently - most notably Scottish and Newcastle - the brewer is now seeking to revamp its approach, become a cohesive, pan-European company and cut costs across borders.

According to its CIO and VP, Kenneth Egelund Schmidt, the brewer's desire to become a pan-European whole has sparked a major IT transformation at the company which will see it overhaul infrastructure, applications and IT departments across its diverse entities.

"The overarching task within Carlsberg is to harvest synergies across countries within Europe. We have realised a lot of synergies locally operating in different countries and now we have to release synergies across borders in Europe. We're going to build a pan-European business model.

"We have to restructure the IT and the different IT departments in order to support this pan-European business model. Today we're a lot of local IT departments," he said.

To assist in the transformation, Carlsberg IT has enlisted Accenture in a three-year deal signed earlier this month.

"They're going to mirror our organisation in supplying whatever we supply to the business of Carlsberg, so it's a very collaborative model.

This is not outsourcing. This is sourcing, because we retain all the management responsibilities and delivery responsibilities within IT. We're simply just supplementing with Accenture. Accenture has a proven track record of delivering these kind of transformation programmes especially within brewing sector. They're a good bet in a partner who can assist not only in the transformation but also maintenance afterwards," he said.

"On top of building a new business model, we have to support everything running right now and then we have to add a lot of new competencies on how we are going to support this global business model. The whole point with Accenture is that we invite them in like any other Carlsberg IT employee and they assist us very closely in the whole transformation - not only in the IT department but also in building this future SAP platform for Europe," he said.

SAP will form the backbone of the company's IT plan in the future, as Carlsberg standardises on a single SAP installation across the business, shedding legacy...

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