How Premier Foods embraced change and successfully migrated their Consolidation processes to the Cloud.

IBM Business Analytics Solution – IBM Cognos Controller

Services – Cloud Migration

Based in St Albans, Hertfordshire, Premier Foods owns and manufactures many of the UK’s best-loved food brands, including Ambrosia, Angel Delight, Mr Kipling, Sharwoods, Oxo, Bisto, Batchelors and Cadbury cakes. Premier Foods are listed on the London Stock Exchange. They employ more than 4,000 people at 15 manufacturing sites and offices.

What challenges were Premier Foods facing?

Premier Foods had an older version of Controller running on-premises, which had supported their group consolidation processes for years.

They needed to get their Controller version up to date and didn’t want to worry about falling behind again. A move to the cloud version was a great option for them, as it would shift the responsibility for patches and upgrades to IBM and reduce the maintenance burden on their IT team.

The project itself had three aspects:

An upgrade to a modern version of Controller with the new consolidation engine
The migration of the Controller application and database into the cloud
The adoption of new functionality such as Controller Web.

Results

The move to IBM Cognos Controller on Cloud was a success. Premier Foods now use the latest software version and don’t have to worry about staying current in the future. This saves time for their IT team and puts them in a stronger position for auditing and compliance.

In addition, we helped them build robust workflows for contributors where data can only be submitted when complete and validated.

Now the move to the cloud is complete, they are in a much better position for group consolidation. The IT and finance teams now have more time to focus on other priorities.

Feedback from Premier Foods

“We definitely felt like we were working with a real expert, and Aramar’s approach gave us a lot of confidence in the planning and execution of the cloud migration”.