MZB streamlines worldwide coffee distribution with Oracle

The Massimo Zanetti Beverage Group (MZB) is a global coffee company that serves over 43 million cups of coffee per day and has more than 100,000 customers. The company has a strong portfolio of leading brands positioned in growing countries that cater to local preferences and trends. MZB sells products in over 100 countries, with more than 90% of its revenue generated outside of Italy, and in approximately 400 coffee shop franchisees worldwide. The company has also installed more than 100,000 coffee machines globally and operates 21 roasting plants.

MZB has grown rapidly through acquisition over the past 30 years. From an IT perspective, acquiring companies meant inheriting multiple unconnected legacy ERP systems. These disparate systems created a huge challenge in groupwide financial consolidation.

In 2018, MZB began looking for a single integrated cloud platform for the entire group. It wanted an end-to-end solution that would encompass financials, procurement, supply chain management, manufacturing, and performance management.

After reviewing the market, MZB selected Oracle because it was the only cloud platform that could cover all business requirements. “Oracle Cloud ERP and SCM brought a series of advantages to simplify management, reduce costs, and keep us always up to date with the latest version of the technology,” says Massimo Zuffi, group information technology director.

Oracle’s unified system integrates the operations of a multitude of businesses acquired over the past few years and replaces hundreds of legacy systems. “Once a new company joins the group, it’s a sort of plug-and-play because the system is already in place,” says Zuffi.

In adopting Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP and SCM groupwide, the company has full visibility and control over coffee roasting and manufacturing  plants, linking the various companies and distribution network through Oracle Cloud.

Oracle Cloud ERP’s financials as well as Oracle Fusion Cloud EPM modules have allowed MZB to enhance decision-making by implementing group accounting rules that result in centralized budgeting and forecasting, monthly consolidated financial statements, and common profit and loss reporting by customers and line items. “The new central finance control is a very big step and provides us enormous benefits in reporting and data analysis,” says Zuffi.

MZB is also taking advantage of Oracle Cloud SCM’s procurement and supply chain management capabilities to harmonize processes throughout the group. Oracle Procurement, for example, has improved the company’s cost controls by enforcing a smooth workflow from purchase requisition to purchase order and invoice.

The company has radically improved control over their coffee machines, which are supplied for free to clients with maintenance contracts in cafés, bars, and retail outlets. Once Oracle Fusion ERP is adopted by all of MZB’s companies, Oracle Cloud SCM will give MZB fingertip access to the location, maintenance costs, and running condition of every one of 120,000 coffee machines at client sites—a task that took weeks to establish under the previous heterogeneous landscape of subsidiary company ERP systems.

“We expect to see improvement in coffee machine maintenance through Oracle Order Management’s end-to-end process,” says Natalia Suarez, IT Director at MZB. “With so many coffee machines coming and going, the application enables orchestration from order capture, fulfillment, installation, and maintenance down to asset decommissioning.”

Order management serves as an order hub to store data such as customer information, order history, field service, and maintenance records, making it easy to conduct analysis to boost supply chain performance.

Oracle Consulting helped MZB deploy the solution across all companies in the group. The consulting service used the True Cloud Method (TCM) to maximize adoption of a solution that replaces multiple ERP systems and involves change management across critical functions. Designed for Oracle Cloud projects, TCM is an early visualization methodology that gives users a picture of what the solution will look like. Oracle Consulting used more than 1,000 MZB-specific business cases to build the validation sessions.