Connecting the Back Office at Scale
Focus Area: Operational Integration & Supplier Payment Transformation
Client
JD Wetherspoon
Challenge
Manual, disconnected processes across rotas, supplier invoicing, and SAP finance workflows across 1,000+ sites
JD Wetherspoon operates over 1,000 pubs across the UK. Behind that scale sits a complex web of operational processes — door staff rota management, supplier invoicing, cost approvals, and financial journal postings — all of which needed to flow reliably into SAP. Without a clear picture of how these processes actually worked end to end, and how data moved between systems, building a robust integration was impossible.
Our Approach:
1. Process discovery: Worked with operational and finance teams to map the full end-to-end workflows: how rotas were managed, how supplier costs were approved, and how financial data needed to flow into SAP across the estate.
2. Integration design: Translated the process map into a detailed integration specification, identifying exactly what data needed to move, when, and in what form — removing ambiguity before any build work began.
3. On-premise deployment: Deployed Cocoon's Connections platform within JD Wetherspoon's own infrastructure, meeting their hosting, security, and governance requirements.
4. Self-billing automation: Built automated weekly payment flows from Connections into SAP, removing manual intervention from the supplier payment cycle entirely.
5. Reference data synchronisation: Connected supplier and site data to SAP, ensuring a single, accurate source of truth across all 1,000+ locations.
Key Outcomes:
Automated weekly self-billing to suppliers, eliminating manual processing across the estate
Accurate, consistent reference data across all supplier and site records
End-to-end integration across rotas, cost approvals, and SAP journal postings
A scalable, supportable solution replacing fragile manual processes that could not keep pace with the business