With approximately $3.6 billion in sales, ScottsMiracle-Gro is the world’s largest marketer of branded consumer products for lawn and garden care. The company’s brands are among the most recognized in the industry. Scotts®, Miracle-Gro® and Ortho® brands are market-leading in their categories. The company’s wholly owned subsidiary, The Hawthorne Gardening Company, is a leading provider of nutrients, lighting, and other materials used in the indoor and hydroponic growing segment.
Over time, we had built a complex web of application integrations and had gradually acquired seven different content management solutions—some of which were no longer supported. Though functional, we were without a unified platform for records, compliance, capture and workflow; plus, our administration efforts and operating expenses were rising. With the imminent prospect of migrating to SAP S/4HANA, we needed to find a way to streamline operations, improve enterprise workflow and cut costs.
Designing a future-ready approach
Our first step was to ask our business partner and systems integrator, 4Matrix, to research and propose solutions. The selection criteria included alignment with our strategy to shift to cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions whenever possible, cost reduction, and meeting our timelines to be ready for the SAP S/4HANA transformation.
From a business perspective, we wanted to boost user productivity by reducing the time people spent hunting for information while providing a 360-degree view of content in a single interface. Additionally, a unified management solution would improve our information governance, particularly for corporate records. At the time we were spending north of half a million dollars a year on the existing apps, which gave us a clear cost-saving target.
Planting the seeds for tomorrow
OpenText™ Core Content Management aligned with our criteria and offered a rapid purchase and roll-out timeline. The sooner we could eliminate legacy applications and embed a streamlined solution, the better.
In just eight weeks, OpenText™ Professional Services completed the implementation, migrated the existing content and archives, and enabled single-sign-on capabilities (our previous systems required multiple sign-ons). We also deployed OpenText™ Core Capture for intelligent document processing, which ingests documents and uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate file classification and data extraction, all of which reduces the internal friction of document management.
Enabling digital transformation
With the upcoming SAP S/4HANA transformation in mind, we also deployed OpenText™ Archiving and Document Access for SAP. This solution supports all SAP interfaces and archiving models for SAP ECC and SAP S/4HANA, which puts us in exactly the right place for our future plans.
Because we did not have the in-house expertise to migrate to OpenText Core Content Management, we relied on the responsiveness of OpenText and their team. As soon as we were ready, we retired the seven previous applications—delivering immediate and significant savings.
Preparing for the AI revolution
Overall, the transition has been a success. On the SAP side, we have completed our consolidation program, and with OpenText Core Content Management and OpenText Core Capture, we have streamlined and strengthened our approach to document management. Eliminating unsupported apps has also enhanced our security, reduced our workload, and cut our costs.
At the practical level, we have restructured our processes and extracted and added metadata to thousands of documents to make them searchable—features that the business units, particularly legal, value greatly. Now that we have shown quick wins, more departments want to come on board, and we’re already looking at other business units where OpenText Core Content Management can add value.
We know the future will include more automation and machine learning. With OpenText Core Content Management and OpenText Core Capture, ScottsMiracle-Gro will be able to use AI to summarize documents, collate reports, and extract data, enabling our people to spend more time on innovation.