Accenture Helps Del Monte Foods Unlock Innovation and Drive Business Growth with the Cloud

Accenture has helped Del Monte Foods, Inc. gain more visibility into its IT operations, access real-time customer insights to inform decision making, reduce IT spending costs by up to 35 percent, and increase operating efficiencies by significantly reducing the time it takes for its professionals to receive IT capabilities, service and support from weeks to less than an hour.

Del Monte Foods’ IT transformation journey arrives at a time when the company is setting the stage for a new era of innovation and growth. In a fiercely competitive market, the leading producer of branded food products realized that it needed to modernize its technology infrastructure to increase its ability to sense and respond to opportunities to capture greater market share by accelerating the speed of product to market.

The project is part of Del Monte Foods’ company strategy of building relevance through product differentiation, expanding distribution into key growth areas, and optimizing the supply chain to increase operational agility.

In less than four months, Accenture helped Del Monte Foods find opportunities to streamline their operations by migrating hundreds of applications including Del Monte Foods’ critical SAP® ERP Central Component system to Amazon Web Services (AWS). This short, seamless migration was possible through the automated tools and the deep experience of the Accenture Cloud Factory, where thousands of large-scale migrations have already been successfully delivered. As part of the transformation, Del Monte Foods is leveraging the Accenture Cloud Platform to automate the management of its cloud services, freeing up company resources to focus on innovating its core competencies of food production and distribution.

With minimal disruption to the harvest seasons, the transition to the cloud has enabled Del Monte Foods to achieve the following:

·      Manage costs by scaling its IT resources up or down quickly and only pay for the computing resources it uses;
·      Have a fluid and responsive organization by consolidating and automating back and front office functions; and
·      Have a future-ready IT platform for automation, analytics and applied intelligence to gain customer insight to inform innovation and accelerate product to market.

“With Accenture as our partner, our move to AWS means that Del Monte Foods now has a more agile operating environment to free up resources for more superior business outcomes, such as ensuring the long-term health of our categories,” said Chad Anderson, Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Del Monte Foods. “Just as important, throughout the entire process, Accenture’s expertise — both in technology and in the consumer goods industry — has helped us build better experiences for our customers by delivering against core consumer trends, such as our consumers' desire to eat healthier foods.”

Key to the migration was the expertise of the Accenture AWS Business Group, which helped develop a comprehensive future-looking strategy for Del Monte Foods to jumpstart targeted solutions for Del Monte Foods’ objectives.

Kishore Durg, Accenture Technology’s cloud and growth & strategy lead, added, “With 132 years of history, Del Monte Foods is a brand that is relentless about adapting and transforming its operations to create relevance at scale to meet tomorrow’s demands. The future belongs to industry-leading organizations like Del Monte Foods who have the foresight to invest in essentials, like the cloud for its agility, and a data-driven backbone for insight-led decision-making, differentiated customer experiences and breakthrough outcomes.”

"We applaud Del Monte Foods and their decision to update their infrastructure in a move to the cloud. Migrating over 200 servers in less than four months has allowed them to be a more agile organization, resulting in a better product for their customers,” said Mike Clayville, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales and Business Development, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “AWS is thrilled to be part of this project with Del Monte Foods and Accenture."

Accenture has worked on 20,000 cloud computing projects for clients, with 80 percent of the Fortune Global 100, and has more than 77,000 professionals trained on cloud technologies and architectures. The company has been innovating in cloud technology for nearly a decade and holds more than 300 granted patents and pending applications across its global cloud portfolio.