In 1896, Teresa Marzetti and her husband Joseph, arrived in Columbus, Ohio, from Florence, Italy, and opened a small Italian restaurant. Marzetti’s Restaurant grew from a local favorite with students from Ohio State University into a four-star restaurant known, in particular, for its salad dressings.

The dressings were so well loved, customers could be seen leaving the restaurant with bottles of their favorites. By 1955, the restaurant’s upstairs kitchen had become a full-scale salad dressing factory and Marzetti dressings could be found in grocery stores throughout Ohio. Today, Marzetti produces many of the salad dressings, fruit and vegetable dips, frozen baked goods, and specialty brand items found on U.S. store shelves.

Liam Durbin, Marzetti’s Chief Information Officer, was brought onboard in December 2018 by Marzetti’s CEO, Dave Ciezinski, who had worked with Durbin previously at Heinz. Durbin was charged with replacing Marzetti’s legacy green-screen PRISM software, which had become outdated, with a modern ERP system.

After a competitive bidding process, SAP was chosen as the new ERP system. Durbin says SAP was selected in part because of its dominance in the consumer-packaged goods (CPG) industry, which aligned well with Marzetti’s business requirements.

Tailwind

The transformation project, known as Project Ascent to reflect its aspirational nature, received board approval within months of Durbin joining, and by April 2019 the company had begun hiring personnel for the project with Capgemini as the system integrator.

Durbin emphasized the strong support the project received from both the CEO and the board—support which he said “created a lot of tailwind” for a project they saw as crucial to ensure the company’s future success.

“The CEO and the board were clear that they wanted the ‘A players’ for the project, creating a dream team to ensure its success,” Durbin said, so they rented a new building to house the project team, providing separation from the main office and allowing the team to focus on the project. This approach ensured that the project team had the necessary resources and environment to work effectively and deliver the project on time, Durbin said.

The initial plan was to execute the project and move to SAP S/4HANA Cloud running on Microsoft Azure in four waves, but it eventually became six waves because of COVID-19. The pandemic forced the team to send everyone home, adding an extra year to the project timeline.

Implementation waves

To adapt, they created wave zero, which involved moving a facility in New Jersey—one of about 16 facilities overall—onto SAP from a technical perspective. “This allowed us to kick the tires and make sure the functionality worked,” Durbin said.

The project team also implemented SAP Trade Promotion Management during this extra time. Overall, the phased approach allowed the team to manage risks and ensure that each wave was successfully completed before moving on to the next. For example, wave one covered finance, trade, procurement, and customer support—“everything touching the customer,” Durbin said, adding that waves two, three, and four went pretty much as planned. “We chose to split wave four in two to de-risk it because it contained two large facilities,” he added.

Project Ascent is now considered complete, and over the past two years the IT team has focused on standing up the product organization and building relationships between product owners and department heads. The product owners, who were part of the project team, now work closely with their respective departments to prioritize and implement enhancements. Durbin said this structure ensures that the company continues to optimize and improve its ERP system, delivering ongoing value to the business. 

Master data project and analytics

As part of the final wave, the team undertook a master data project to ensure data accuracy and consistency across the organization. By standardizing and cleaning the master data, the company improved its ability to make data-driven decisions and enhance overall business operations.

The company chose Microsoft for its analytics platform, which, Durbin said, “allowed us to keep the clean core so we now do most of our reporting and analytics on the Microsoft platform.”  

He said one of the objectives of the project is to democratize access to data within the company. As part of this process, the team is trying to build a community of super users who can create reports themselves using Power BI and Power Platform, “so the democratization is underway,” he said while acknowledging that those employees in operations “are going to need some help.”

AI projects

The company already has several AI projects underway, including an accounts payable (AP) automation project using optical character recognition to streamline the process and reduce manual effort. “In addition to projects like AP automation, we are also very excited to see what AI capabilities SAP will be adding to its products,” Durbin said.

Looking back at the Project Ascent, he highlighted the importance of having a fully-staffed organizational change management team for SAP training and change management. He said the team played a crucial role in ensuring the project was rolled out on time and provided training and support to employees, helping users—some of whom had never used a computer mouse—adapt to the new system.

“The amount of work involved in training people on how to interact with SAP was a lot bigger than we thought because how technology has changed,” Durbin said, adding that another challenge has been recruitment. “As COVID-19 started to ebb and people were starting to go back into their jobs—and this condition still persists today—a lot of factories and manufacturing businesses have had difficulty hiring hourly workers again.”

“Some of the glamour of a well-paying manufacturing job has sort of gone away in America, and I think other companies, other countries as well, need to restore that,” he said. “So, we’ve had to deal with high turnover in some of our locations. Turnover is a wild card, and for the success of a project you just can’t understate it.”