Campina: Product Life Cycle Management

Overview

Campina is a large dairy company with production sites in Europe, global sales of €3.6 billion in 2003 and 6,700 employees. Over the past years Campina has been consistently in the top 10 of global dairy companies. The product portfolio consists of basic dairy products, luxury desserts, cheese and butter with all the main European retailers as clients.

Business Challenge

The industrial products division sells business to business and is FDA-compliant. High pressure for more efficient and faster innovation processes, a recent tightening in food legislation (such as the labelling act of January 1, 2005), increasing tracking and tracing requirements resulted in a burning platform to improve Campina's product life cycle management (PLM), more specifically through a product specification system (PSS).

How We Helped

The company turned to Accenture to help develop a platform that would be transparent across far-flung business units. Optiva from Formation Systems was implemented as the single source of reference for product, process and recipe-related data for all groups within Campina. Furthermore, new product development, product clearance and product change management processes were harmonized and implemented.

High Performance Delivered

Now the company enjoys fast and easy exchange of critical information, including:

Insight in portfolio (finished products as well as ingredients and packaging materials).
Product definitions, terms and specifications between groups.
Clearance and change control procedures.

According to Campina, "The new system will help us to keep an innovative edge—which is critical in our business. The system will also improve our performance in terms of product safety and overall efficiency. Accenture brought the right approach and skill mix for this project and our joint effort resulted in a project delivered on-time and within planned budget."