Greggs has gone through significant change in recent years, transforming from a traditional bakery to a ‘Food on the Go’ retailer and this initiative, twinned with ageing legacy systems, was the primary contributing factor for the business change programme. Keytree is supporting Greggs through significant company-wide systems and process changes as part of its Business Transformation.
Greggs are now into the third year of the Sunrise Programme; a five-year, significant investment, focused on people, processes and technology. The Sunrise programme began in 2015 and the first releases featured the implementation of eProcurement, Learning and Development and the Customer Interaction Centre. The following year saw the implementation of SAP Finance, Procurement and PLM swiftly followed by SAP Retail, Forecasting and Replenishment, finishing off this successful year with the implementation of SuccessFactors Recruitment. 2017 will see the introduction of SAP to Greggs’ Manufacturing and Supply Chain.
In 2015 Greggs selected Keytree as their Systems Integrator to help with this major programme and this partnership has been highly effective, with a range of successful projects delivered to date. The latest implementation of SAP Retail is being rolled out to Greggs’ 1,800 shops, with more than 1,600 shops already converted to the new technology.
“When going through the selection process, Greggs wanted to make sure they had the right partner to work with, and the biggest driver was the cultural fit,” said James Holmes, Programme Manager for SAP Transformation at Greggs. He added: “The second key driver was making sure Keytree had the technical capability to be able to deliver the functionality Greggs wanted and to ensure we had a solid strategic relationship – and this has built up over the past three years.”
Greggs wanted to keep the solution as “vanilla” as possible, but it needed to be both innovative and offer clear business benefit. They also needed it to be quick and easy to use. One major innovation was the design and jointly developed user-friendly Fiori based Procurement User Interface. Built using SAP’s design-thinking approach and using Fiori UX standards, the solution was rolled out seamlessly to over 500 office-based users with the training managed and delivered by SuccessFactors e-learning.
James Holmes – Programme Manager for SAP Transformation at Greggs
Change management is at the heart of the objectives for Programme Sunrise, acknowledging that it will affect every employee and partner working in the Greggs ecosystem. A two-step approach was put in place to support the learning needs of teams – awareness training followed by navigation training.
The Greggs learning and development team worked closely with the Business, Testing and Functional Systems teams to ensure that the material created was fit for purpose. Early adopter training, delivered to users involved in UAT, provided relevant knowledge to support testing but also to gain feedback from the business users, which could then be incorporated before full training rollout. Post training delivery, an on-line assessment questionnaire was sent out to all trained users to assess their knowledge.
To deliver this approach, Keytree implemented with Greggs the SuccessFactors Learning Management Module to replace the traditional classroom based training – this enabled Greggs to create and deliver training materials for all system releases in the programme in a straightforward and efficient way. This has now also become embedded as a training delivery approach across the business beyond systems.
Greggs introduced a dedicated Cutover Manager to the programme with responsibility for planning and executing the cutover strategy – ensuring there was sufficient time in the plan to allow for a full dry run of the cutover processes in advance of Go-Live. This approach paid dividends as issues were flagged up and addressed well in advance of the actual Go-Live, meaning that the final cutover into production went without incident.
The food-on-the-go retailer has more than 1,800 outlets in the UK, and Tony Taylor, IT and Business Change Director at Greggs was pleased when the first store started to use the new system. He said: “Going live with our first shop was a significant milestone as we knew the goal was to upgrade the whole estate. Subsequently, the process was replicated with 80 – 100 stores per week, proving that we had a model, we could roll out successfully.”
A newly created dedicated hypercare support hotline was managed by Greggs’ functional consultants, sitting alongside Keytree technical experts to ensure an easy transition alongside an efficient knowledge transfer. Keytree provided six weeks of hyper care after Go-Live and during this period, a transition exercise was undertaken to ensure that there was an efficient transfer of knowledge to the Greggs support team so that they could take on first and second line support at the end of the hypercare period.
Greggs are already reaping the rewards of their investment. Simplified processes, greater visibility of information, a procurement system that enables Greggs to buy better and a learning management system that has revolutionised the way that Greggs can roll out training to its 20,000 employees. And this is just the start – the retail solution was rolled out to shops in 2017 and as the next phases of the programme are introduced, the whole supply chain is set to be transformed with the introduction of new processes underpinned by SAP to support Greggs’ vision to be the customers’ favourite for food-on-the-go.
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