Cadbury probing for sweet success

Cadbury Schweppes' global business transformation project is due to hit the UK early next year.

The confectioner's ambitious initiative, called Probe, is the biggest IT project in its history

It will cover 200 countries, 38,000 employees and 54 data centres.

Australia and New Zealand will be the first to go live in October, while the company's UK division is due to start work early next year in preparation for a 2004 implementation.

'Probe will fundamentally and radically change the way we do business,' said Cadbury Schweppes chief executive, John Sunderland.

A global SAP deployment is a core part of the project, along with the introduction of job scheduling technology from SBB to improve efficiency and reduce errors.

The project is being driven from three regional IT centres based in Birmingham, Dallas and Melbourne, all of which will host the SAP software. The centres are supported by a new IT infrastructure consisting of IBM RS/6000 and Microsoft Windows 2000 servers, an IBM storage area network and a global wide area network.

Probe started in earnest last year, says Shaun Williams head of IT at UK arm Cadbury Trebor Bassett.

'It is about added value in the business, efficiency and gold standard business practice. It's also about bringing improved revenue opportunities and will allow us to work smarter and better, both internally and externally.

'The intended benefit of the project is to give us the processes, tools and technologies to enable efficiency gains to be taken and more value created in all of our businesses. It's also about liberating our people to do more value added work and enable us to focus on the growth areas of the business,' he said.