Northrop Grumman Corp., a 25-billion company specializing in defense and technology products and services for the global market, has selected ADEACA ONE to standardize and streamline its business processes on a common platform.
For a number of years, Falls Church, Virginia-based Northrop Grumman was using SAP as its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for its U.S. operations.
However, the company’s international subsidiaries in the United Kingdom, Australia, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Japan, and Korea were using a variety of solutions to plan and manage their businesses – solutions that had little or no integration to Northrop Grumman corporate.
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This lack of standardization on one platform made it more difficult for Northrop Grumman to gain real-time insight into the business to efficiently manage its operations. It also reduced visibility into the status of customer contract deliveries and increased the overall risk to the company’s profitability.
Northrop Grumman took a “growth through acquisition” approach, especially with its international business, and decided not to extend SAP to all of its subsidiaries because of its high cost per user; cybersecurity concerns for its U.S. defense contracts; and because SAP bears too heavy an IT support footprint for smaller remote field operations.
To meet its goal of standardizing its business processes and become more lean, Northrop Grumman decided to deploy a two-tier ERP strategy, using an enterprise SAP backbone for U.S. operations combined with an easier-to-use and easier-to-support implementation of ADEACA ONE to manage subsidiary operations in select countries.
Two-tier ERP works well for companies with different lines of business that require different processes or accounting methods, have large and small independent divisions, or divisions that operate in different locations around the world.
Northrop Grumman decided on ADEACA ONE because a common platform for subsidiary use makes it easier to roll out newly acquired subsidiaries, manage remote performance data and leverage knowledge between organizations to gain more timely insights into the business.
Additionally, ADEACA ONE offers expanded financial capabilities, including analytics, and sensor point technology provides improved visibility into the current state of operations.
ADEACA ONE satisfied the business needs of Northrop Grumman’s international entities by rolling up financial and operational data into the SAP system – and it’s also less expensive to purchase and maintain.
ADEACA ONE made sense for Northrop Grumman because it delivered a tightly integrated project ERP, giving its subsidiaries a common enterprise operations management framework with a much smaller IT support footprint than SAP.
Taking a two-tier ERP approach that relied on ADEACA ONE to manage subsidiary operations enabled Northrop Grumman to standardize processes and coordinate its operations, ensure a higher degree of visibility and increase confidence in contractual customer deliveries as its international business expands. This approach is leading Northrop Grumman to becoming a “boundaryless organization” with the ability to operate in real-time around the globe.
