British American Tobacco (BAT) has a 10-year working relationship with Apriso, during which time the flexibility, scope of capabilities, and depth of Apriso’s solutions have been realized first hand at six international manufacturing sites. BAT has elected to standardize its operations on Apriso FlexNet, a manufacturing execution system (MES) software solution. By ensuring processes are managed at the right level between ERP (SAP) and FlexNet, operations have been simplified, contributing to greater agility and quality across BAT’s operations, helping to enable improved capacity utilization. 

Apriso didn’t replace any competitor products at BAT, at least not yet. BAT is initially focusing on rolling out Aprios’s solution in the strategic (Tier 1) manufacturing sites that do not currently have an MES system in place. These sites have mainly been using a composition of some in-house developed applications and other small, “homegrown” point solutions. In the later phases of the project, BAT will reportedly put more emphasis on aligning all of its Tier 1 sites on a single MES platform. The systems that are currently in place in these locations are Siemens Simatic IT and SAP MII (Manufacturing Integration & Intelligence).