Intelligent Consumer Products

Helping your company stay ahead of the consumer products curve

Consumer products companies are facing challenges: they need to transform at an increasingly rapid rate to address unprecedented change. Half of S&P 500 companies will no longer exist by 2027, driving organizations that want to gain competitive advantage to focus on strategies that enable them to be more agile, resilient, and responsive to transformation.

EY teams have identified common trends and technology capabilities required in the consumer products industry in order to respond to disruption. EY Intelligent Consumer Products offering and EY’s industry knowledge can support your company to address these changes on SAP’s offerings through EY Accelerate for RISE with SAP^®.

Here are few points of interest:

• 77% of consumers are changing the way they shop, presenting an opportunity for consumer products companies¹.
• 87% of digital buyers consider order delivery time a key determining factor when purchasing²​.
• 50% of senior supply chain executives expect autonomous and sustainably conscious supply chains by 2025³.
• 33% of jobs today will be performed by software, robots and machines — enabling a focus on value-adding jobs⁴.

The EY value-led approach

Our value-led approach is specifically designed for the consumer products sector and tailored to our clients’ business needs, with focus on:

• Defining a clear road map: This paves the path forward for each organization, whether they are embarking upon complete transformation, upgrading a previous rollout or somewhere in between. The EY team's approach has the ability to track business benefits from kick-off to go-live and builds enterprise-wide buy-in for change. 
• Accelerating delivery: Our Intelligent Transformation Platform (ITP), which includes a complete suite of tools that drive a value-focused delivery, using automation to streamline and fast track system build, testing and data migration helps in accelerating the delivery.
• Jump-start your implementation with EY Intelligent Consumer Products: Our offering, based on SAP leading practices, features all key processes across finance, sales, and supply chain. It also includes industry specific EY differentiators around Smart Invoicing and Smart Factory.
• Putting people at the center: With this approach, we are engaging the business throughout the project to achieve successful, sustainable change.
• Bringing the whole of the EY organization: We are taking a whole-of-business approach — from tax, supply chain to climate change and sustainability — to unlock greater business benefits from the transformation.

The typical goal is to support you to harmonize and simplify processes and systems in order to improve business benefits and lower total cost of ownership (TCO) with minimal business disruption.

The EY SAP Intelligent Consumer Products offering

To help our consumer products clients make the best of the technologies across the value chain while preparing their businesses for the future, EY teams have developed a comprehensive pre-built, CPG-specific SAP offering augmented with EY differentiators called EY Intelligent Consumer Products offering. Based on the latest version of SAP S/4HANA^®, this offering covers key processes leveraging SAP leading practices and latest products, such as SAP Commerce Cloud^®, SAP Integrated Business Planning^®, SAP Ariba^®, etc. 

EY Intelligent Consumer Products offering is based on CoPPA (Consumer Products Process Architecture). It reflects market trends, impacts sourcing and procurement decisions and affects operations as a whole.  It also contains processes mapped to SAP transactions or SAP Fiori^® apps, key performance indicators, and controls and is integrated via ARIS with SAP Solution Manager^®. 

The EY SAP Intelligent Consumer Products offering differentiators

Digital customer — B2B and B2C engagement

• Open new channels to customers
• Provide seamless digital experiences through intuitive UX design and integration across the value chain
• Accelerators include Commerce Cloud with pre-built integration across supply chain and finance

From linear to network — a supply chain transition

• The transition to network-based supply chains will require all players to increase their flexibility, responsiveness and synchronization to survive
• This requires a shift from cutting costs to adding value and building networks which rely on new hybrid forms of cooperation and competition

Data-driven enterprise — use machine learning to predict and plan

• Real-time information sharing between suppliers, business partners and customers
• Utilize data based on customer spending, weather events and IoT to adapt forecasts
• Machine learning and pattern recognition can be used in SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP) to sense demand differences based on real-time downstream data 

Intelligent automation — designed in and scaled

Digitize and automate to reinvent processes across the value chain:

• Digital fulfillment tailored to support each business strategy and customer segment 
• Real-time information and insights to automate logistics collaboration
• Real-time and touchless contract management 
• Augmented intelligence for real-time financial insights such as sales per country

Benefits of our approach

• Alignment between business and IT around the case for change and value-led SAP S/4HANA road map based on a thorough process and system diagnostic.
• Improved adherence to SAP standards through a value-focused approach, allowing reuse of selected components of the legacy systems (e.g., forms/interfaces) and to redesign only the processes that require it.
• Accelerated and experience-led design using the EY SAP Intelligent Consumer Products offering to achieve an outcome that works for the users and the business.
• Utilization of automation to de-risk and accelerate the move to SAP S/4 HANA with EY Intelligent Transformation Platform for SAP S/4HANA (ITP): selected configuration, selected code, data cleansing, data migration, testing.
• Delivery of additional business value from EY offering enhancements and innovation (PUIC dashboard, virtual agent, payment prediction, etc.) supported by our wide range of capabilities, e.g., tax, digital grid, supply chain.
• Focus on user experience, targeted training and benefits management throughout the transformation to optimize user proficiency in the offering and increase resulting business benefits.