Graham Packaging Company manufactures more than 20 billion blow-molded containers annually for a marquis client list that includes The Coca-Cola Company, Unilever and Pennzoil. The company operates 81 plants in 16 countries, generating more than $2 billion in annual sales. Hundreds of vendors support Graham Packaging’s distributed production facilities. In order to maintain high quality standards, Graham Packaging needed a consistent way for the plant managers and the Global Supplier Quality team to collectively drive supply chain performance.

Information required by the Global Supplier Quality team was dispersed throughout the organization in SAP, in spreadsheets and in other informal systems. Numerous technology challenges had to be overcome in order to systematically improve supplier management, including:

• A user-friendly front end was needed to enable access to Graham Packaging’s SAP and other applications in order to view quality trends or drill into other KPIs such as PPM (Parts Per Million) defects or on-time delivery.

• The company needed to eliminate its reliance on spreadsheets. Plant managers and quality engineers used them to submit qual¬ity data to the home office and the quality team manually created reports using spreadsheets, which resulted in delays, errors and inconsistencies.

Graham Packaging credits its arcplan dashboard for complementing its SAP implementation and generating substantial benefits.

• Fact-based supplier management yields cost reductions in price negotiations, eliminates sub-par suppliers and improves delivered quality

• Elimination of spreadsheet use among quality team, plant managers and executives for data collection and analysis

• Rapid application deployment and modifications because data access is direct and the development environment is intuitive

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