By Jo Best, 20 April 2009 14:00
INTERVIEW
...systems as it goes.
"You name it, we got itÂ…Because we have a local strategy, we have local solutions," Schmidt said of the current set-up.
One of Carlsberg's breweries in Switzerland will serve as the test bed for the installation once it's designed, informing the rollout plan for the business as a whole, with a pan-European rollout scheduled for the end of 2014.
"We're going to spend a year making the design - not only the IT but the business process ownership and standardisation. Coming from a local company, there's a lot of hard work to do on a pan-European basis," he added.
SAP is not the only overarching software grand plan at Carlsberg - Microsoft will play yin to its yang across the brewer's 10,000 seats.
"Since we are going to do the IT support through this new business model, of course some of our core processes will run on SAP but there are a number of processes that have a bad fit or no functional fit within SAP.
"Our first choice is to look at the world of Microsoft and ask how can we complement our SAP solution. Besides that, since we are standardising the whole infrastructure, that would push out that we standardise everything on Microsoft technologies - on the LAN, desktops, the internet, intranets, SharePoint stuff," Schmidt said.
But before any of the software standardisations can happen, the infrastructure the brewer runs on is also set for an overhaul.
The infrastructure refresh has been outsourced to IBM and is already underway.
"We are more than half way based on the partnership with IBM but some of the companies we have bought have not been integrated yet. The IT infrastructure is crucial for Carlsberg - we are a very, very transaction-heavy company with a lot of logisticsÂ… it has to work 24 hours a day. Any small disturbance has a business impact. Our job is to go and do it and minimise the disturbance in the business and hopefully there will be no disturbance.
"It's very challenging because we're so dependent on our IT infrastructure," Schmidt said.
The IBM work should be complete around the end of next year.
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