InformationWeek

napple soft drinks may be touted as being "made from the best stuff on earth," but until last year, the Snapple Beverage Corp. was far from the best at moving its products to distributors around the country. Improvements to the company's order-entry system, however, are helping get products to distributors faster and with less hassle.

The White Plains, N.Y., company last week implemented Webpro EX software from BravePoint Inc. The company's software helps eliminate errors that result when employees key faxed orders into Snapple's MFG/PRO enterprise resource planning system. With manual order entry, it took 24 hours to confirm an order.

Those problems were at "an unacceptable level to our customers and to the company," says Joe Holland, VP of IT for Snapple. Now distributors can just log on to Snapple extranet sites, enter their orders, and get immediate confirmation and delivery date.

The system, which was deployed late last summer, now handles 80% of the orders from 75 distributors. That amounts to 40 million cases of soft drinks a year, or $500 million in orders, Holland says. Distributors can get reports on pending orders, look at invoices, and check on in-stock products. Snapple also posts sales and marketing data to help distributors make purchasing decisions.

Webpro EX contains only the presentation logic for the system and sits between the ERP system and Microsoft's Internet Information Server running on Windows NT. Orders are placed directly into MFG/PRO.

Snapple is still trying to figure out if the system, which took six weeks to deploy and cost $50,000, has produced reductions in its processing costs. But Holland says the company is moving forward with plans to further enhance collaboration by letting distributors input their inventory levels, sales, and promotions to help Snapple find trends and forecast demand. In July, the company plans to launch an application that will let Snapple sales representatives get customer information online.