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 anufacturers and retailers have
different expectations of the Internet. Most retailers, for
instance, have a primary interest in using the web as a sales
channel - part of an emerging trend to sell to consumers
in store, on-line, and wherever else they may be. Larger food
manufacturers do not see the web as a sales channel. To
these companies the Internet is a cog in a wheel that is used if
it can help cut costs, comply with customer requirements or to
boost brands at the consumer level.
The tasks associated with cutting
costs and meeting requirements are vastly different than those
that are marketing oriented. The end result is that most often
organizations develop two separate web strategies. 1) The marketing
department develops a strategy that focusses on the brand and the
consumer while 2) the IT
department crafts a strategy to use the Internet to meet demands
and realize efficiencies.
In this issue we look at how the IT department of Hershey Foods
readied their network to meet the company's requirement that
enterprise applications be web-enabled.
 HERSHEY'S
- In 1999 Hershey experienced a
software conversion that cost the company upwards of $150
million in sales. That fall they rolled out an SAP R/3 system
that tried to simultaneously implement ERP, CRM and supply chain
management systems. What the candy giant ended up with was a
crisis in which product deliveries were botched for the critical
Halloween season. SAP ended up with bad press and an angry
customer. Neither Hershey or SAP has provided details as to what
caused the system failure in 1999; however both worked together
on the fix and the two companies maintained their relationship.
Fast forward to 2002. Hershey
completes a successful upgrade of its SAP platform to include
SAP's new Internet-based functions. Essentially SAP web-enabled
its systems so that employees and users could access the system
over the Internet or intranet. This prompted Hershey to realize
that eventually its entire enterprise application landscape
would need to be web enabled.
Building a Web Services
Environment
Hershey's learned some valuable
lessons in 1999 about software conversions. It needed to ensure
that everyone from the CEO on down understood how web services
would change it business processes - and that they all commit to
the change. After all the company has over 13,000 employees,
runs 18 manufacturing plants in North America, and has
operations in China, Brazil and Japan.
In addition to its SAP platform
Hershey enterprise application environment includes
Manguistics
(transportation management), Siebel and a variety of internally
developed JAVA applications. Hershey did host a fair amount of
static web content on I-Planet and IIS web servers but moving
applications to the web is far more challenging. In order to
provide the appropriate access to applications to so many
dispersed users Hershey's IT department had to wrestle with a
couple of key issues:
- Design and secure
web-enabled network.
- Create a Single Sign On
(SSO) across the web service environment to applications
that had their own means of identifying users.
Web-Enabled
Network:
Hershey's main data center is
located at the company headquarters in Pennsylvania. To manage
its data center, Hershey maintains a technical staff of just
over 200 people--with 50 percent of them involved with SAP
applications and the rest focused on application development and
delivery, as well as other operational processes. The IT crew at
Hershey's is made up of a talented lot (turnover runs around 1%)
and Computerworld has voted it one of the best IT departments to
work for.
The web enabled network consists
of an Intranet that provides web access to corporate
applications and an extranet that allows customers, such as
retail store chains, to check order status online. The majority
of its manufacturing plants in North America and South America
connected to the data center. Hershey relies on Sun hardware
including a Sun Enterprise server for its Java technology-based
B2B Web site; Sun Fire and Sun Enterprise servers running the
Solaris 8 Operating Environment to power its SAP modules; and
additional Sun Fire and Sun Enterprise servers running Oracle8
databases at the back end, to manage the data for each of the
SAP modules. A DMZ and firewall manage traffic in and out of the
data center.
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