Diageo is a group of international consumer drinks-goods companies with portfolio of world-famous brands. Diageo uses a warehousing and logistics company to deliver its goods to retail customers worldwide.

Diageo Northern European Logistics (NEL) covers Austria, Belgium, Germany, Luxemburg, Netherlands, and Switzerland. Diageo NEL used an independent costing system to calculate warehousing and secondary distribution costs and to prepare performance reports for its logistics operation. This legacy system was not owned by Diageo, and had the drawbacks that it did not support a warehouse costing model with fixed cost budget and transportation matrix. The system also did not provide required reconciliation and KPI reporting capabilities.

Diageo NEL challenged Keystone with the goal of creating a faster and more accurate cost calculation and reporting solution for the NEL markets.

Our solution

Keystone created a user-friendly reconciliation and reporting system interfaced with Diageo's SAP and third party distribution systems which:

• Reduced error inducing manual processes and increased confidence in data integrity
• Eliminated time consuming data verification or reconciliation exercises
• Increased speed and effectiveness of reporting
• Provided independence to the NEL markets by offering access to a library of reports online
• Provided a modular system for periodic updates to costing models
• Reduced operational costs by eliminating the third-party monthly services

Project Activities

Project was completed in several stages including:

1. Investigation of warehouse costing models, transport cost, cost calculation, allocation, and reporting requirement
2. Creation of functional requirements specification of the new application
3. Application User Interface design
4. Web-based KPI reporting system design
5. Diageo SAP and distribution company inbound and outbound interfaces design
6. Technical design and custom solution development
7. Implementation and roll-out to each market

Outcomes

New custom software interfaced with SAP and distribution systems created a cost-effective framework for logistics costs reconciliation. Based on comparison and cost calculation of customer, order and fulfillment data based on actual deliveries, Diageo has a full control of logistics costs and any delivery discrepancies on monthly basis. The system also enabled inter-company cost allocation on each Diageo order, at the product, customer and market levels.

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