Lion’s Tech Chief on the Brewer’s Freedom from ‘Soviet-Era’ ERP, AI Plans and Cyber Lessons Learnt

It’s hard to believe but until recently, beverage giant, Lion Co, was running a “Soviet-era” core ERP system that could no longer support its plans to serve a new generation of non-beer drinking consumers.

“The marketplace for Lion is changing significantly; younger consumers are turning away from our core category, which is beer. [Lion] is trying to reinvent itself in terms of ‘how do you recruit the next generation of consumers?’

“To do this, we understood that our legacy systems were not ‘fit-for-purpose’ for Lion to be successful in the digital age”, says Ram Kalyanasundaram, Group Technology and Digital Transformation Director at Lion.

Lion replaced a character-based ERP first deployed in the 1980s with the SAP S/4 HANA platform, running on an AWS cloud. It also deployed SAP Ariba, SAP Concur, Success Factors, Cyber Fusion Centre and Integrated Business Planning solutions in tandem to “re-engineer the enterprise”, Kalyanasundaram says.

The…