About the client
Post Consumer Brands® is a leading U.S.-based consumer packaged goods company, known for its wide range of popular food products. It operates multiple manufacturing plants and distribution networks to serve retail and commercial customers. The company manages diverse product lines across grocery and pet food segments.
Client challenges
For more than a century, Post Consumer Brands has been a household name in grocery aisles. However, over the last decade, the company has set its sights on bold new goals: expanding its product portfolio through acquisitions and modernizing its IT infrastructure, replacing legacy on-premises systems with best-of-breed SaaS applications.
From acquiring pet food brands to adding cereal and snack lines, Post grew rapidly; however, each acquisition presented the same challenge: integrating disparate systems without slowing business momentum. TK Balaji, Post Consumer Brands’ CIO, recognized the need for a solution to integrate these new companies quickly.
Beyond just onboarding acquisitions, the company also sought to optimize its supply chain and cash management. Their key objectives were to achieve clear visibility into major partner business transactions and ensure timely and accurate data access for all applications.
However, the reality was complex:
- The legacy and the leap: When Post Consumer Brands began modernizing its IT landscape, legacy ERP dependencies, such as Oracle JD Edwards, still powered critical operations. Even as the company embraced best-of-breed SaaS applications, these legacy systems created friction. Balaji’s team had been gradually offloading operations to SaaS apps, but the move introduced a new problem: data fragmentation.
- The integration illusion: Connectivity turned out to be another hurdle. Modern SaaS applications often lack the seamless integration that enterprises need, as APIs frequently lack the necessary capabilities. The team faced the complexities of dealing with unfamiliar data models, which demanded retraining. To work around these limitations, Post relied on flat files for data transport, a method that introduced latency and added operational overhead. All these challenges made one thing clear: every application needed access to golden records, master data that is consistent and accurate across the enterprise.
- The custom code conundrum: Meanwhile, the Post IT team had been writing custom code in Oracle to build integrations; however, this approach was time-consuming and challenging to maintain. Balaji realized this wasn’t sustainable. He envisioned his team working at an abstraction layer, using low-code techniques to accelerate development, enhance agility, and mitigate complexity.
To overcome these complexities, Balaji and his team sought a solution—a fast and easy way to build integrations and enhance master data management along with a trusted Boomi partner who could help them achieve this with ease.
Solution
Implementing a New MRO Data Standard
For food product manufacturers, tracking MRO assets is essential to operational efficiency. To help Post achieve this, we implemented a standardized maintenance, repairs, and operations (MRO) data model for categorizing materials, parts, and components.
Using Boomi Integration, we enforced the MRO standard. We built integrations for MRO data across JDE, MVP One (an asset maintenance management application), Infor Datastream 7i (an enterprise asset management (EAM) application), and Gatekeeper (a vendor and contract lifecycle management platform). By creating an MRO data standard and connecting the key asset management applications, Post now synchronizes parts and plant data quickly, efficiently, and reliably, streamlining MRO workflows.
Integrating Data from Pet Food Brands
Post’s rapid growth included multiple pet food acquisitions, each with its plant-level applications holding valuable order and revenue forecast data. LevelShift built integrations to move this data to Azure cloud storage and then into Snowflake’s data lake using Boomi. From Snowflake, the data flowed into Kinaxis Maestro, a supply chain planning tool, and remained ready for other applications in the future.
With Boomi’s HTTP Connector, the integrations were extended, linking Snowflake, JDE, and Maestro to manage critical data, including sales orders, shipped orders, latest demand, and revenue forecasts.
The new integrations enabled acquired pet brands to retain their existing applications while providing Post with timely data to manage and optimize pet food sales and operations.
Integrating Other Acquisitions and Improving Visibility into Customer Orders
When Post added a peanut butter brand to its portfolio, LevelShift ensured the data integration was flawless. Using Boomi, flat-file data is migrated efficiently into Snowflake, providing Post’s internal systems swift access to vital information.
The same approach facilitated the acquisition of a ready-to-eat cereal business with two manufacturing plants. Using Boomi and Snowflake, we integrated data from these plants into Post’s core business applications.
And we didn’t stop there—LevelShift also integrated data from two major grocery brands, empowering Balaji’s team to pull essential insights, such as sales forecasts, directly from third-party systems into their demand planning tools.
Setting Up a New Supply Chain Management System
We worked on another critical initiative to set up a new supply chain management system. The goal was to support Post’s move toward a best-of-breed SaaS architecture while streamlining end-to-end planning processes.
To achieve this, we used Boomi to integrate core systems including JD Edwards Orchestrator, the JDE database, Kinaxis Maestro, and a custom Oracle-based application, enabling critical supply chain capabilities such as sales and operations planning, inventory visibility, demand forecasting, capacity planning, procurement coordination, supplier collaboration, and real-time part and logistics tracking.
To support these operations with agility and scalability, we implemented an event-driven architecture using a pub-sub model with Boomi Queues and Azure Service Bus, resulting in a loosely coupled system that can respond quickly to changes in demand, supply, or operational constraints.
All these integrations helped automate end-to-end supply chain planning for sales, inventory, demand, and capacity planning. LevelShift built services for:
- Part customer data
- On-hand inventory data
- Site data
- Part source transfers
- Scheduled receipt transfers
- Scheduled receipt buy data for open orders
- Part source buy data
Creating a Single Source of Truth (Master Data) with Boomi DataHub and Streamlining Cash Management
Post Consumer Brands faced a growing challenge: while HR functions were centralized, each division continued to operate in silos. Over time, disconnected project teams began creating separate data extracts for role-based access provisioning and SaaS applications—driving up complexity and data inconsistency. Though Post already had access to the Boomi Enterprise Platform, its full potential remained untapped.
The turning point came when Post set out to modernize its financial operations. One of the most pressing hurdles emerged within its cash management workflows. The existing Oracle JD Edwards (JDE) financial module demanded extensive manual input for payment processing and data handling. Managing deductions through the Deductions Management System was especially tedious, time-consuming, and error-prone.
To address this, LevelShift designed and implemented Boomi orchestration processes that extracted master data from JDE in JSON format. This data was routed via Boomi APIs into Boomi DataHub, where it underwent comprehensive quality and consistency checks. Once cleansed, it was pushed to HighRadius, where manual processes were replaced with streamlined, automated workflows—greatly improving efficiency and accuracy.
LevelShift launched a master data management initiative to help Post fully leverage Boomi’s data capabilities. Collaborating with Balaji and his team, we used Boomi DataHub to create golden employee records that delivered clean, standardized data across all headquarters applications. This eliminated the need for manual flat-file sorting and ensured compliance with division-specific rules.
The results were clear and immediate. Post gained a centralized hub for managing and accessing its cash data across multiple applications. Now that cash data from multiple applications is automatically synchronized, cleaned, enriched, and updated in real time, Post’s financial team can work more quickly and efficiently on cash management projects.
Benefits
We helped Post transform its IT landscape from a handful of legacy on-premises applications to a modern, best-of-breed SaaS architecture. Working closely with Balaji and his team, this evolution automated processes, improved data quality, and increased overall operational efficiency. As a result, Post has achieved the following:
- Established a centralized hub to manage and access cash data across multiple applications.
- Enabled real-time synchronization, cleansing, enrichment, and updates of financial data for greater accuracy.
- Empowered the financial team to execute cash management projects faster and more efficiently.
- Improved connectivity across business applications, maximizing the benefits of their cloud migration strategy.
- Introduced a new MRO data standard by integrating with GateKeeper, an MRO SaaS application.
- Enhanced supply chain management through integrations with JDE Orchestrator, JDE Database, Cosmos DB, and Kinaxis Maestro.
- Orchestrated data transfers for SaaS applications with complex APIs, reducing integration challenges.
- Built a repeatable integration framework to onboard newly acquired companies and product lines quickly.