To get up to speed, however, Hershey had a lot to do. It began upgrading and standardizing its 5,000 desktops, a mix of outdated PCs and mainframe terminals, with Pentium PCs running Windows 95 and Microsoft Exchange. It also upgraded its mix of SNA and DEQ legacy protocols to TCP/IP, complemented by new hubs, routers, and other gear.

This laid the groundwork for moving to an SAP implementation. The deployment took 30 months and ended in July. The SAP modules replaced a variety of mainframe legacy applications.

Hershey is complementing the SAP functions with the installation of Manugistics' Integrator application for forecasting and production scheduling, transportation management, and distribution requirements. It also installed the Siebel Sales Enterprise application to manage customer relationships and track the effectiveness of marketing efforts.

With all this in place, Bentz turned his attention this year to installing a bar-coding system for tracking all incoming and outgoing materials at Hershey's six U.S. production plants. The system provides a better way of controlling the manufacturing process, the associated costs, and revenue.

"Going through Enterprise 21 was no easy task. It was as hard as we expected," Bentz says. Yet he's looking to the next 12 months and implementing a host of Web initiatives involving the company's intranet and Internet operations. The focus will be on E-business and improving the flow of data among the business partners in Hersey's supply chain, he says. He declined to be specific, noting that the efforts are in early planning stages and could change depending on technology standard developments with UCCnet.

Other IT chiefs in the industry also are tight-lipped about E-commerce projects, as the technology may provide a strategic competitive advantage. PepsiCo Inc. in Purchase, N.Y., which includes the Pepsi, Frito-Lay, and Tropicana brands, is implementing a handful of supply-chain projects, says CIO Steve Schuckenbrock.

One project is an i2 Technologies' Rhythm application for enhancing the company's supply-chain reporting and forecasting abilities. The application taps into PepsiCo's product-management system, including the order, pricing, and product information associated with every product ID number, and uses that historic data to more accurately forecast supply needs.

PepsiCo will be able to accurately project inventory needs as far as 10 to 14 days, compared with only three days in the past, Schuckenbrock says. The application also includes a transportation module for managing inbound and outbound materials and products. Full rollout will take another two years because of the size of PepsiCo's worldwide distribution network, which accounts for 160,000 sales calls a day.

The rollout is also waiting on a companywide IT restructuring, which will help PepsiCo share information and resources more easily among its three companies, Schuckenbrock says.

Like Earthgrains, PepsiCo is also delving into scan-based trading. Schuckenbrock says PepsiCo is testing the technology with several of its partners and is getting close to finding the best technical approach to executing scan-based trading. "We still need to learn the role of the Internet in the process, as well as other efficiencies," he says.

Schuckenbrock is planning to unveil an E-commerce project designed to provide better information to retailers about sales of specific types of food and beverage products compared with industry averages. The tool will help retailers know just how well PepsiCo product sales--particularly when cross-promoted--compare with those of competitors' brands. "If we're right, it will give us quite an advantage," he says. "It's all about making it as easy as possible for our retailer partners."

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