OUTSOURCINGISSUE 31
MORRISONS ‘EVOLVES’ WITH IT OUTSOURCING
Morrisons updates on progress halfway through a major fi ve-year business transformation project W
ith a forecast spend of approximately £310 million,
the Evolve programme will signifi cantly change almost every area of the company and the technology Morrisons uses to run its business, built on Oracle’s core application suite. Richard Pennycook,
Morrisons fi nance director, said: “The Evolve project supports our quest to drive the top line, increase effi ciency and capture growth.” Gary Barr, Morrisons chief
information offi cer, added: “This was more than a systems replacement programme. It is a business change programme enabled by the replacement of the existing IT systems, in order to support the continued and future growth of the business. The greatest challenge is that we needed to replace the systems across the entire business. The decision was taken four years ago to do a complete refresh of absolutely everything, including infrastructure, hardware, software, even email. It’s a complete replacement of every system in the business, and hence the Evolve Programme was branded.” He explained how IT existing systems
were “light touch”. “They did what the business had wanted, but they had been stretched to their limit, and the technology was hugely dated,” Barr continued. “The systems weren’t fl exible enough, and many things that the business might want to do just weren’t supported by the systems.” Morrisons undertook a comprehensive review of the market, and selected almost the entire Oracle applications suite, including fi nance, manufacturing, retail, supply chain, trading and warehousing. Phil Goodwin, Morrisons programme director, took up the story. “We selected
business that are really making a difference to people’s day to day work, and a good example of that is the voice picking, which has gone live in our warehouses.” Morrisons entire
infrastructure has been replaced, including a new wide area network. The Active Directory has been completely replaced, so the entire database layer and middleware layer has all been installed. To date, Morrisons has also gone live with fi nancials, trading, logistic, manufacturing, human resource and electronic point-of-sale/cash offi ce. On the fi nancials segment, Wipro Retail worked with the retailer to custom develop the solution, which needed to be confi gured and designed to Morrisons requirements, and covered
Oracle for the platform, and had come up with our top three system integrator partners, which were Wipro Retail, IBM and Oracle themselves. When we looked at the Oracle implementation references, many said that we should be speaking to Wipro Retail. We decided to shortlist Wipro Retail based on such strong feedback. During planning and scoping we allocated project streams to different potential partners; Wipro Retail impressed us most with their agility, quality of people and their cultural fi t. We are confi dent that they have the capability to meet the future needs of Morrisons.” Wipro Retail is supporting Morrisons
to achieve the core objective of delivering effective planning, management and delivery of large-scale systems and process change based on an Oracle enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform, providing a companywide new IT infrastructure. Pennycook commented: “During 2010 we’ve started to deploy systems into the
accounts payable, purchasing, i-procurement and inventory. Currently the Oracle solution is integrated with the legacy systems, which are all to be replaced. The rollout has centralised fi nancial operations, and is integrated with Cube, Morrisons corporate database.
“One of our biggest challenges, which has
proved to be successful is that we’ve had to keep our old legacy systems running, and the process of keeping them going while interfacing them into the new system with no interruption to the business. Nothing we’ve done in the programme has had any impact whatsoever in our ability to actually get a product to a shop and to a customer,” concluded Barr. Evolve is set to run until 2013. In the year
ahead, Morrisons plans to complete the roll- out of its new checkout systems to all stores, conclude the population of the new product master fi le, as well as further rollouts in logistics and manufacturing.
MARCH/APRIL 2011 RETAIL TECHNOLOGY
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