ScottsMiracle-Gro Cultivates Efficiency with OpenText Solutions

ScottsMiracle-Gro’s 150-year history is a story of growth. However, during a recent digital transformation project, the company’s critical documents were scrambled in a web of outdated, legacy systems. This posed a clear challenge as the company sought to prune the old to plant a new, unified platform for enterprise-wide document management.

The man tasked with this digital gardening, Mani Velayudhan Pillai, Director of SAP Operations at ScottsMiracle-Gro, knew a full-scale overhaul would be a tough sell. “We had multiple legacy and out-of-support DMS systems,” Pillai recalled in an interview.

Moreover, gaining consensus from every business user for a single new solution was also a significant hurdle. “We decided to look for a solution at a very small scale compared to an enterprise level, and OpenText Core Content Management fit that bill,” he said.

Planting a Seed with a Pilot Project

Pillai’s team took a strategic, seed-and-grow approach to the hurdle. They initiated a pilot project in the legal department, aiming to demonstrate immediate value and build momentum. The goal was to migrate legal documents to OpenText Core Content Management, which is a cloud-based content management solution, and showcase a 360-degree view of how documents are managed through this solution, complete with workflows and metadata.

According to Pillai, the move to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model was a game-changer. “I’ve been a user of OpenText for 10-plus years on the SAP front, but when I got to see what the core content does for us, where you don’t have to manage the servers or the infrastructure side of things, it made real sense for us,” Pillai explained. “It’s a win-win situation, both for the business and IT.”

The migration was swift as well. With the help of the OpenText professional services team and the OpenText Content Bridge tool for mass uploads, the initial project was a resounding success. “It took less than eight weeks to extract the data out of our legacy system and get it imported into OpenText,” Pillai noted. Business users were quickly won over by the simple and intuitive interface, as well as the powerful search capabilities. “They really enjoyed it since it was easier compared to the old ECM technology that we had,” he added.

Automating the Harvest with AI

ScottsMiracle-Gro then turned its attention to automation, guided by Pillai’s core principle: “If there can be a task that can be automated, then it should be automated.” This is where OpenText Core Capture came into play.

It began with using this tool to handle shipping receipts, bills of lading, and pick tickets. Pillai explained that previously, these documents were difficult to categorize and retrieve. “With OpenText Code Capture, we capture the barcode and save the document with the barcode number, and that gets uploaded into OpenText,” he said.

This simple application of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) transformed the process by enabling the business to automatically capture key metadata directly from the document itself, thereby enhancing searchability and organization.

What began as a simple migration project has now blossomed into a company-wide success story. “We are now looking to use OpenText to add more documents, even for the current business processes that we have,” Pillai concluded.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

ScottsMiracle-Gro’s success provides SAPinsiders with a practical blueprint for integrating modern document management within a complex SAP landscape:

• De-risk transformation with a pilot project. Major digital transformations, like an SAP S/4HANA migration, are complex and costly. ScottsMiracle-Gro’s strategy to start small with a non-core department was a brilliant way to de-risk change. For SAPinsiders, this approach can quickly demonstrate the value of a new content management system, building crucial business confidence and internal momentum before tackling mission-critical, SAP-centric processes.
• Align your content strategy with your cloud strategy. As more of the SAP world moves toward cloud models, such as RISE with SAP, the organization’s content management strategy must follow suit. Thus, integrating a cloud-native platform like OpenText Core Content Management simplifies the overall architecture, reduces the burden on internal IT and Basis teams, and aligns perfectly with a modern, agile, cloud-first approach.
• Utilize automation to address tangible SAP process pain points. By targeting a specific, manual pain point, ScottsMiracle-Gro created immediate business value. SAPinsiders can use this lesson to identify a process bottleneck and apply intelligent capture to automate data entry and enrichment. This boosts efficiency and improves the quality and context of the data attached to SAP transactions.