Edrington

Edrington owns some of the leading Scotch whisky and golden rum brands in the world, including The Famous Grouse, Cutty Sark, The Macallan, Highland Park and Brugal.
Headquartered in Glasgow, the company has a number of specialist operations covering every facet of distilling, blending and bottling, as well as marketing. Edrington also exports to over 100 markets.
In April 2010 Edrington was chosen as the ´Outstanding Private Company` at the Scotland plc awards.

About the Project

Based on its experience with a previous upgrade, Edrington had constructed a detailed upgrade plan. A Project Control Board was chaired by the sponsor, a main board director, and included project managers and representatives from IT, Edrington’s business units and NTT DATA Business Solutions. PRINCE2 was used to manage the overall project and the Project Control Board focused on ensuring that everyone involved delivered their portion of the work in a timely and professional manner.

Training was also an important part of the project plan, and NTT DATA Business Solutions assisted Edrington with it. “When you upgrade, users can be faced with new functionality and new ways of processing transactions, which can cause disruptions to the business,” says Stephen McGinley, IT Manager at Edrington.

At the end of the project go-live went extremely smoothly. “The upgrade was a very successful project,” says Alan Carlile, Director of IT at Edrington. “Having main board sponsorship was key, as were the level of testing and the three go-live dry-runs we conducted. What I liked about NTT DATA Business Solutions was the fact that their people were willing to work collaboratively with us, rather than having their own way of doing things.”

Edrington’s decision to upgrade was a strategic one, designed to bring their applications to the latest technical revision, although there were some benefits in terms of reduced hardware and software maintenance costs. Since the upgrade Edrington has constantly been tweaking the systems to improve business processes, including re-writing its legacy production system to interface more closely with SAP. In addition, helped by Itelligence, Edrington has extended its use of SAP by implementing the plant maintenance features.