Nestlé adds Athanor to global project

Dateline: 17 July 2003

Similarity Systems, a leading provider of enterprise Data Quality management software, announced today that Nestlé, the world's largest food and beverage company, has chosen ATHANOR™ to standardize and cleanse its master data. The project is part of Nestlé’s Global Business Excellence (GLOBE) program, an extensive business re-engineering and reorganization project, which is expected to deliver cumulative benefits and cost savings of up to €2 billion for the company by 2006.

ATHANOR has been implemented to automatically standardize and transform information from Nestlé companies around the world as it is loaded into a new SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) system at the center of the GLOBE initiative.

“Awareness of data quality, as a strategic business issue, continues to increase among large enterprises, and technology can be an enabling factor in achieving improvements,” said Ted Friedman, principal analyst at Gartner. “Data quality products must address a broad range of problems, which extend well beyond traditional customer name and address cleansing, and validation. They must become ubiquitous throughout the enterprise to achieve the greatest impact on an ongoing basis.”

“Achieving the high levels of Data Quality needed for new business initiatives to succeed is more than a once-off exercise,” said Garry Moroney, chief executive officer, Similarity Systems. “The only way to ensure that accurate, consistent and timely data is delivered to new and existing business systems is through an ongoing Data Quality management program.”

Nestlé selected Similarity Systems ATHANOR to carry out data cleansing and transformation as it offered an easy to use, flexible and complete data quality solution with powerful reporting capabilities.

ATHANOR is designed for ease of use, reducing the time it takes to implement projects and cutting the overall cost of Data Quality enhancement programs. In contrast to other solutions ATHANOR requires little or no coding to implement a huge range of cleansing and standardization functions. Nestlé plans to roll ATHANOR out across its international operations in less than six months. Nestlé SA operates 508 factories in 85 countries and employs over 254,000 people worldwide. Global sales for 2002 were over USD 65 billion (89 billion Swiss Francs).

ATHANOR works across all master data types such as materials data, customer data, asset codes and vendor data. At the same time ATHANOR can accept data from multiple disparate sources.

The Similarity Systems product enables Nestlé to process multiple data types and rapidly configure customized business rules so that each subsidiary can take responsibility for cleansing its own legacy data. With its powerful reporting tools ATHANOR also enables Nestlé to measure and improve Data Quality on an ongoing basis.

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