Process Management 4 mins read

Alicorp unifies 60 years of processes

Learn how ARIS can help with your SAP S/4 HANA migration program.

Elke Bastian Elke Bastian

Growing your company is almost always a good thing.

But when organic growth plus multiple mergers and acquisitions give you a tangle of disparate systems and business processes, it could lead to operational anarchy.

Alicorp Peru has come a long way from its modest beginnings in 1956 as an oil and soap manufacturer. It is now the leading company of consumer goods in Peru and one of the biggest in Latin America. It has evolved into four business lines – consumer goods, B2B, aquaculture, and milling – and has a presence in seven countries with +9,000 employees.

Over the years, Alicorp has inherited or bought new technology solutions to solve local problems, while running new applications to better serve global customers. In the meantime, it had to merge many different systems from numerous acquisitions. There was a lack of process visibility, both internally and externally.

Digital roadmap

But Alicorp didn’t get where it is today by being slow to react. That’s why it established an ambitious digital roadmap in 2017: The goal being to unify all technologies by 2025.

“Our business mantra is ‘feeding the growth of tomorrow,’” says Juan Balbin, corporate IT director at Alicorp.

We have 60 years of commitment to our cause. But it was clear that we would not be able to keep this up without addressing the huge issue of disparate systems and processes.”

What was called for was business process transformation. This was not without challenges. Alicorp needed to unify all the technologies and processes across its four business lines, while standardizing and automating them across all geographies and subsidiaries. The company was also struggling to find an open process management platform that could integrate with its new SAP migration.

So, it set to work. The first major milestone that had to be achieved as part of the roadmap was a corporate-wide migration from SAP R/3® to SAP S/4HANA®. Alicorp knew this would be a huge project, but it underestimated how significant it would also be for the second part of its planned business process transformation.

“We started to look into phase two of our roadmap and quickly realized that there were few vendors out there that were genuinely open enough to integrate with SAP S/4HANA. Least of all expose the processes linked to SAP R/3 instances that were soon to be obsolete,” says Balbin.

Search ends with ARIS

Alicorp searched very hard. It knew what it needed:

  • A powerful business process management platform with a definitive process governance system regarding roles, responsibilities and hierarchies. One where engineers, designers, architects and strategic suppliers could all collaborate using a connected user interface.
  • It wanted to manage performance through process mining functionality and optimize processes aligned to strategic KPIs.
  • It wanted operational risk and compliance management capabilities.

It was hard enough finding a vendor that had the technology to do all this, let alone one independent and open enough to create a fluid flow of data between the new process architecture, the obsolete SAP R/3 instances and the new SAP S4/HANA software.

Its search ended when it found ARIS. It discovered that Software AG’s ARIS Enterprise could do it all—and come with an SAP integration solution. In less than two years, Software AG’s expert services teams fully migrated all the processes across the parent Alicorp businesses.

In under a year and a half, all 500 users were actively using ARIS and sharing a single point of truth regarding both company and customer journeys. Alicorp predicted that it will gain 20% more efficiency in its operations, reduce incidents, avoid expensive change requests, and be able to centrally control everything.

And the partnership with Software AG continues to expand through services and additional products. Alicorp now relies on Software AG’s webMethods for further complex integration projects and its Alfabet IT transformation platform for asset management. Alicorp is better placed than ever before to feed the growth of tomorrow.

You can read the entire customer hero story here to learn more in more detail about how ARIS and Software AG have helped Alicorp – and others – in their journey to process excellence.