Being a dominant player in the beverages market Delta felt that purchasing a 700-user licence for Syspro 6.0, the latest release of Syspro's business solution software, would be a step in the right direction.

Alastair Wright, ICT director of Delta, says Syspro 6.0 is a critical component of the company's drive towards world-class business practice.

"Having grown into an industrial and commercial conglomerate, 2002 saw Delta unbundle its operations to become a focused beverage company once more, supporting several beer and CSD product groups and brands," he adds.

He says that the change has led to a complete re-engineering of business processes. "An enterprise-wide suite of resource planning, execution and analysis tools was recognised as an essential success factor for the new organisation," he adds.

One of Delta's minority shareholders is SAB Miller, whose Africa & Asia operations have standardised on Syspro software for several years.

"One of our objectives is to align ourselves with SAB Miller's policies and procedures wherever possible, and its global strategy allows a choice between Syspro and SAP. After a thorough evaluation, we chose Syspro because it met our requirements at a substantially lower cost of ownership," Wright continues.

All financial ledgers are scheduled to be live before the end of March 2003. By this time, Delta has also planned to have four sales and distribution centres live and operational, the full fleet/asset management system installed and the compensation and benefits function of the human resources stream live.

The roll-out of the sales and distribution modules and the implementation of the manufacturing modules is expected to take a further 12 months.