Case Study

Schoeller Allibert Chooses SnapLogic To Enable Digitization

Schoeller Allibert Backstory

Schoeller Allibert is a market leader in providing returnable, reusable, and recyclable plastic packaging to customers across Europe and the rest of the world. With over 60 years’ industry experience, the company provides a comprehensive range of standard and tailor-made Returnable Transit Packaging (RTP) solutions across ten key product categories. Schoeller Allibert’s customer portfolio focuses on key industries within agriculture, automotive, food and beverage, retail and e-commerce, industrial manufacturing, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and more.

Internally, Schoeller Allibert’s IT team consists of 20 people and within that a two-person team manages the company’s integrations and are tasked with keeping the company connected.

The Challenge

In 2018, the Schoeller Allibert IT team kicked off their internal digitization initiative called ‘Project MOVE’. It was primarily centered on the introduction of their new ERP system, supplied by enterprise solutions provider IFS, across all of their manufacturing sites. To support this project, they were looking for a platform that could help to integrate and rationalize their diverse data and application architecture consisting of both cloud and on-premises systems.

After reviewing their existing IT landscape, and the different systems and applications that supported it, they knew they needed a modern integration platform as a service (iPaaS) solution. To help connect their disparate systems, the team sought a stable, flexible, all-in-one solution that would integrate their information infrastructure in a transparent and uniform way, but wouldn’t involve a huge resource and time commitment building and maintaining custom APIs.

The ideal iPaaS platform would underpin the data infrastructure of the company, and would be provided by a stable and respected industry partner with a proven track record of providing best-in-class connectivity. This would allow Schoeller Allibert to maintain its day-to-day IT and business operations efficiently and without disruption.

The Solution

Following a rigorous RFP process, Schoeller Allibert’s integration team selected SnapLogic’s Intelligent Integration Platform as its iPaaS platform of choice thanks to its ease of use and the intuitive nature of the software. From here, they were able to connect the old ERP system with the new IFS system as well as with a number of other legacy systems. The first country implementation of IFS went live in July 2020. SnapLogic supports the intercompany processes as well as loading of the data warehouse.

Marc Schmitz, CIO at Schoeller Allibert, commented: “We needed a platform that could support our IT strategy that moves our company from a paper-based way of working to a system-driven way of working.

This starts with a new ERP system and later integrates with our other applications and data sources. Once we saw the SnapLogic platform, we knew it would be an ideal fit for our integration requirements. It’s ease of use and streamlined processes have made the roll out incredibly straightforward allowing us to complete our initial ERP integration in record time.”

Business Outcomes

SnapLogic’s initial implementation has meant Schoeller Allibert was able to successfully integrate its new ERP system at its first site, allowing teams in countries using the legacy ERP system to continue fulfilling intercompany orders with countries live on the new IFS system. The company also has longer-term plans for digitization and will connect all strategic systems with SnapLogic in such a way that the company always has one single version of the truth when looking at its business data. As part of its first IFS roll out, Schoeller Allibert decided to partner with a third-party ERP implementation specialist to support the project.

In addition to their ERP roll out and as part of the broader digitization initiative, the use of SnapLogic has opened up broader integration opportunities within the organization including new HR integrations with Schoeller Allibert’s LMS systems as well as integrations to support the sales team that have allowed them to push relevant data into their CRM system simply and easily.

Using the SnapLogic platform, Schoeller Allibert’s IT Team built a single front-end platform for their sales team in the field, drawing on information from various systems in real-time and providing product information as and when it is needed. Furthermore, SnapLogic was also linked to the company’s product information management (PIM) system allowing their sales teams to fetch product data in a streamlined and straightforward way.

Beyond this, SnapLogic’s platform also now allows the IT team to respond to internal service requests in a fraction of the time it would have previously taken. The ability to make quick and easy changes to existing pipelines gives the integration team the agility to respond to problems in a way that they couldn’t before.