The Wonderful Company harvests savings and boosts efficiency with Oracle Cloud

The Wonderful Company is renowned for its commitment to promoting health through consumer brands. The company cultivates, harvests, bottles, packages, and markets a wide range of products, including household names like FIJI Water, Wonderful Halos, and POM Wonderful. Beyond its keen eye for evolving market trends, the organization strives to make the world a better place, focusing on building sustainable practices and giving back to communities.

After a series of acquisitions, the company had to manage an expansive production network with multiple international brands, divisions, product lines, packing houses, and farms. The different business units used a complex mix of on-premises systems, including legacy instances of Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Hyperion, and Oracle JD Edwards. These highly customized tools created growing pains—high maintenance costs, disjointed processes, and operational inefficiencies across finance, planning, and supply chain.

On the finance side, numerous general ledgers and a lack of financial visibility across divisions complicated accounting and reporting activities. Similar functions such as planning and forecasting were almost entirely manual.

In addition, managing the vast supply chain network was becoming increasingly difficult. The varying requirements for freight logistics, manufacturing, and supplier qualification and onboarding became a barrier to meet growing demand.

The Wonderful Company decided it had to standardize processes and transform the technology ecosystem with a long-term cloud strategy that could outpace growth and further support sustainability efforts. After assessing business needs and considering top cloud vendors, the company selected Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM), and Oracle Fusion Cloud Supply Chain & Manufacturing (SCM).

Company leaders saw immense value in the unified Oracle Cloud Applications suite because they could synchronize finance and supply chain operations across all facets of the business, gaining greater efficiency and a platform for growth.

Modern capabilities would simplify financial activities, from accounting and financial close to short- and long-term planning, while eliminating manual work for employees. The company was also keen to consolidate its supply chain and logistics processes to optimize shipping in line with sustainability goals.

Running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), the application suite would eliminate maintenance costs associated with the old on-premises systems, scale to support business growth, provide new functionality with quarterly updates, and reduce carbon emissions by allowing the company to move out of its data centers.

First, The Wonderful Company migrated its on-premises Oracle Transportation Management workloads to the cloud. Due to the complex nature of the company’s logistics, this initial move was beneficial to quickly consolidate freight across multiple business units, streamline shipments, and broaden supply chain visibility.

After this strategic migration, the company made another enterprisewide shift by standardizing its global chart of accounts using Oracle Cloud ERP. Moving away from multiple on-premises instances and onto the modern cloud platform allowed The Wonderful Company to standardize a single general ledger and improve visibility through a centralized location for all financial data.

The company then began implementing the full Oracle Cloud SCM and Oracle Cloud ERP suite for one of its largest divisions—citrus. Despite the high degree of supply variability in the agribusiness industry, the division improved its ability to balance supply and demand using Oracle Supply Chain Planning. The Wonderful Company further optimized the division’s vertically integrated supply chain using capabilities within Oracle Inventory Management and Oracle Manufacturing, easily monitoring fruit volumes and resolving production bottlenecks to increase throughput. The company also wanted to turn around 95% of the division’s trucks in under two hours—a lofty goal. Thanks to Oracle Warehouse Management, the division exceeded its target, turning around 96% of trucks in that time frame.

In addition, The Wonderful Company’s citrus division automated and streamlined financial processes with Oracle Cloud ERP. The seamless integration with Oracle Cloud SCM meant all supply chain functions were connected to the company’s finances, which simplified accounting downstream. This allowed analysts from different teams to easily drill down to the transaction level in subledgers while using a common platform to collaborate and share best practices.

Oracle Procurement also accelerated the supplier qualification and onboarding process, making it easy to select and source materials from sustainable suppliers to align with the company’s vision and ESG goals. Additionally, The Wonderful Company’s farming segment seamlessly integrated Oracle Project Management to facilitate its distinctive planning requirements. This integration proved instrumental in enhancing control and visibility, simplifying the scheduling and forecasting of staffing needs during peak citrus season, and effectively managing expenses like tractor and equipment depreciation. The tool automatically fed this information to the enterprisewide general ledger, eliminating tedious data entry tasks.

Oracle Cloud EPM, combined with the division’s accounting practices in Oracle Cloud ERP, helped users gain a better understanding of profitability and costs and sped up the financial close. The platform’s planning capabilities were immensely valuable given the vertically integrated business model. The previously manual process was standardized and streamlined thanks to the tool’s automation and embedded machine learning, enabling users to self-serve and generate informative reports for executives. Overall, the citrus division reduced its financial planning time by over 35% with Oracle Cloud EPM.

By adopting the integrated suite of applications, The Wonderful Company saved millions, improved productivity and visibility, and reduced carbon emissions to align with corporate values. Confident in the success it has seen with Oracle Cloud Applications, The Wonderful Company has begun rolling out the tools to additional divisions to further standardize processes, support business growth, and foster a healthier world.

The Wonderful Company selected Infosys, Accenture, Propero, and Accelalpha to assist with its Oracle Cloud Applications deployments. The collaborative partner team helped manage the complexity of multiple verticals and business units through streamlined process design. The partners continue to help the company as it rolls out the cloud applications to additional divisions within the enterprise.