Lion's transformation into a digital organization

The path to digital transformation

Lion, one of Australia and New Zealand’s leading beverage companies, wanted to continue growing and expanding into new markets. It also had plans for taking an industry leadership role on sustainability best practices.

Demand in the market, however, tended to shift often as consumers chased new beverage trends. Lion needed to increase its responsiveness to dynamic consumer preferences and operate more efficiently.

So, the company embarked on an ambitious transformational journey to create a next‑generation digital enterprise with the consumer at the center.

Lion chose SAP S/4HANA® for its new enterprise system and Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its cloud platform but needed a partner that could help guide Lion through their transformation.

Revolutionizing operations in the cloud

Lion partnered with Accenture to create a lean and efficient digital organization. The team created an intelligent finance operating model connecting tech, talent, and data and analytics to provide Lion’s leadership with real-time insights. Manual processes within payables, general accounting and collections were automated—streamlining processes and freeing talented people for more meaningful work.

Designing a new enterprise foundation using SAP software gave Lion a unique opportunity to identify new and complementary solutions that would help increase agility and growth.

The migration to AWS was no less ambitious. Working together, Lion and Accenture migrated more than 400 workloads housed on 115 servers to AWS and decommissioned 113 servers and apps that were no longer needed.

Cheers to sustainable growth

The implementation of SAP S/4HANA and migration to AWS bring new capabilities to all parts of the organization. And, reduced carbon emissions from the public cloud puts Lion on its path to becoming the first large-scale, carbon-neutral brewer in Australia.

With the new SAP B2B ecommerce portal, more than two-thirds of all orders are now placed through the self-service channel. This reduced call volumes to the contact center by more than 50%.

Intelligent operations also helped lessen aged debt, cut the time to close the books from five days to two, and reduced customer set-up time from seven days to 24 hours.

Whether it’s integrating new acquisitions or launching new products, Lion now has a continuously innovating digital capability across its business to support its growth for years.