British American Tobacco explains its global SAP strategy

British American Tobacco (BAT) is in the middle of a major ERP consolidation programme that will culminate in a single instance of SAP operating in 65 global markets by 2016.

Jon Veness, data lead at BAT, spoke to Computing ahead of the SAP User Conference in Birmingham next week and described the complexity of the project.

"The SAP ERP programme will support all global processes, global data and information," said Veness.

"Five or six years ago we had 62 ERP instances operating across our global markets, and we have consolidated this down to seven regional instances," he added.

"But they are still implemented in different ways in different markets, so we are still operating in a multi-ERP environment. We want to move to a single global template where everyone will be operating in the same way in every market."

The ERP system will be hosted in Germany, and Malaysia has been selected as the pilot market, which will go live in September 2012 and run for about five months.

Veness estimates that the rollout to all regions will be completed between 2014 and 2016, and will cost "hundreds of millions of pounds".

"It is going to massively reduce the cost for us. We have a lot of inefficiencies in maintaining these systems and putting together global information," said Veness.

"There is a growing demand for consistent information across all of our markets, but at the moment we have an awful lot of different people and regions extracting data, putting it together and providing it to the business," he added.