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ScottsMiracle-Gro logoThe ScottsMiracle-Gro Company

Garden care manufacturer finds savings by eliminating legacy apps and switching to OpenText™ Core Content Management and OpenText™ Core Capture

ScottsMiracle-Gro logo

About ScottsMiracle-Gro

ScottsMiracle-Gro is the world’s largest marketer of branded consumer products for lawn and garden care. Their subsidiary, The Hawthorne Gardening Company, is a leading provider of nutrients, lighting, and indoor/hydroponic growing materials.
ScottsMiracle-Gro uses OpenText cloud content management to cut costs by $500K
  • Founded:
    1868
  • Employees:
    6,500
  • Revenue:
    $3.6 billion
  • Leading brands:
    Scotts®, Miracle-Gro®, Ortho®

Summary

Challenges

  • Multiple document management solutions were costly to maintain and manage.
  • Information was trapped in separate systems.
  • Needed to streamline back-office workflows.

Solution

  • Developed a unified approach to document management.
  • Performed a fast and seamless migration.
  • Enabled integration with key business apps.

Results

  • document search icon Enabled a fully searchable document archive
  • Lower costs icon Saved $500,000 by eliminating legacy license fees
  • Compliant document icon Strengthened audit trail and compliance

Challenges

  • Multiple document management solutions were costly to maintain and manage
  • Productivity suffered with information trapped in separate systems
  • Preparing for a migration to SAP S/4HANA highlighted the need for streamlined back-office workflows

Like many large corporations, ScottsMiracle-Gro relies on multiple back-office systems, including SAP and Salesforce solutions, and generates a constant flow of business-critical documents, each of which must be managed, directed, processed, and stored.

Mani Velayudhan, director of SAP operations at Scotts, remarked, “Over time, we had built a complex web of application integrations, and we had gradually acquired seven different content-management solutions—some of which were out-of-support. While functional, without a unified platform for records, compliance, capture, and workflow, our administration effort and operating expenses were rising.”

As part of the company’s digital transformation vision, ScottsMiracle-Gro planned to migrate to SAP S/4HANA solutions, moving away from on-premises infrastructure towards cloud-based operations. Similarly, the company wanted to move to software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions to enable a closer match between workload volume and operational expenses.

Velayudhan continued, “With the imminent prospect of migrating to SAP S/4HANA, we aimed to streamline operations, improve enterprise workflow, and cut costs.”

Two colleagues working on a project on a laptop

Once we had shown the quick wins, more departments wanted to come on board, and we’re already looking at other business units where OpenText Core Content Management and OpenText Core Capture can add value.

Mani Velayudhan
Director of SAP Operations, ScottsMiracle-Gro

Solution

ScottsMiracle-Gro implemented OpenText Core Content Management: an easy-to-deploy, cloud-based content management system that helps the company drive its cloud and SaaS strategies, streamline and simplify operations, and reduce expenses.

Products deployed

  • OpenText™ Core Content Management

    AI-powered cloud content management that seamlessly integrates into crucial business applications

  • OpenText™ Core Capture

    Information capture public cloud SaaS application using continuous machine learning to automate intelligent file classification and data extraction

Services provided

  • OpenText™ Professional Services

    Achieve business objectives and maximize ROI through a people-centric approach to offering personalized strategic advice, support, and solutions

Targeting a unified approach to document management

ScottsMiracle-Gro aimed to boost user productivity by reducing the time people spent hunting for information, with a 360-degree view of content in a single interface. The company’s vision was a unified content management solution that would improve information governance, with streamlined operations to reduce administration workload.

The selection criteria included shifting to cloud and SaaS solutions whenever possible to align with the company’s cost-reduction targets. At the time, the company was spending a significant amount on licenses for legacy document management apps.

The project also gained urgency, as it was important to reduce the workload on the IT team in preparation for the company’s imminent move to SAP S/4HANA. 

Performing a fast and seamless migration

ScottsMiracle-Gro implemented OpenText Core Content Management—a SaaS content management solution that aligned fully with the CIO’s vision and criteria, offering a rapid roll-out timeline as well as seamless integration with SAP S/4HANA. In just eight weeks, OpenText Professional Services completed the implementation and migrated the existing content and archives using OpenText ContentBridge.

To provide a smooth user experience, they configured Ping Identity® to enable single-sign-on for all Microsoft Active Directory users. In addition, the team deployed OpenText Core Capture—a SaaS solution that intelligently automates file classification and data extraction through continuous machine learning.

Enabling integration with key business apps

With the upcoming SAP S/4HANA transformation in mind, ScottsMiracle-Gro deployed OpenText Archiving and Document Access for SAP Solutions. This solution supports all SAP interfaces and archiving models for SAP ECC™ and SAP S/4HANA, in readiness for the SAP project.

Velayudhan commented, “By ourselves, we would not have had the expertise or resources to migrate to OpenText Core Content Management. OpenText was easy to work with and very responsive.”

ScottsMiracle-Gro also uses Google solutions to support key business processes and is considering leveraging the OpenText Core Content Management integration with Google Workspace™ as a way to provide complete document visibility across the enterprise.

A person enjoying the outdoors with a phone in their hand

With OpenText Core Content Management, ScottsMiracle-Gro can evaluate generative AI solutions, like OpenText Aviator, to summarize documents, collate reports, and extract data, enabling our people to spend more time on innovation, which is where we want to be.

Mani Velayudhan
Director of SAP Operations, ScottsMiracle-Gro

Results

With OpenText Core Content Management, the company has streamlined and strengthened document management, eliminated unsupported apps, cut costs, enhanced security, and reduced IT workload in readiness for the SAP S/4HANA transformation.

Enabled a fully searchable document archive

With OpenText, the company has taken the opportunity to restructure its document management with intelligent document processing— adding extracted metadata to thousands of documents to make them searchable.

Velayudhan remarked, “Overall, introducing OpenText Core Content Management and OpenText Core Capture has been a huge success. The unified, searchable document store has features that the business units, particularly Legal, really like. Once we had shown the quick wins, more departments wanted to come on board, and we’re already looking at other business units where OpenText Core Content Management and OpenText Core Capture can add value.”

Saved $500,000 by eliminating legacy license fees

Consolidating metadata-enriched records to a single document repository has not only made it faster and easier to find information—it has also empowered Scotts to drive significant cost-savings by decommissioning redundant legacy systems.

“As soon as we were ready, we retired the seven previous applications, resulting in immediate and significant savings,” said Velayudhan.

Strengthened audit trail and compliance

Leveraging the built-in data governance capabilities of OpenText Core Content Management, Scotts has gained a structured, automated, and transparent way to manage its enterprise information lifecycle.

The company’s team is already planning its future, taking advantage of intelligent document processing, automation, and machine learning. Velayudhan concluded, “With OpenText Core Content, we can evaluate generative AI solutions, like OpenText Aviator, to summarize documents, collate reports, and extract data, enabling our people to spend more time on innovation, which is where we want to be.”

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