Lipton Canada

Lipton Canada was replacing a highly-tailored, 15-year-old information system with SAP R/3 because the old system was not Y2K compliant. The project leader encountered difficulties configuring SAP to handle the particular way the company managed trade spending, which was how Lipton supported cooperative promotional work with its customers. To date, it had proved impossible to configure SAP to emulate this key process exactly. Three options were under consideration: should the implementation team rewrite the SAP R/3 software? Change the way trade spending was handled to a process that was easily configured in SAP? Or continue to search for a configuration that would produce the exact trade spending process required? The project was already behind schedule.