In Sweet Deal, Accenture Helps Put Twinkies Back On Shelves

The multiyear agreement includes designing and building new operations and system support for all levels of the Hostess enterprise. As part of the deal, Accenture developed end-to-end office processes and new distribution systems. In addition, it provided a new IT infrastructure, hardware and software, and a new data center on Accenture's private cloud. Financial terms of the deal were not released after it was signed in April.

"There are certain pieces that we adopted from the old company, but it's almost building everything from scratch. And that's the biggest challenge we faced. You're building essentially a company, while the company is forming and you're setting up an entire IT landscape," said Kesav Maganti, managing director in technology delivery at Accenture, who helped facilitate the project.

[Related: Accenture Bolsters Cloud Platform With Support For AWS, Azure, Verizon And NTT ]

Maganti said that all Hostess IT is integrated under the Accenture system and it will act as a managed services provider going forward, managing the IT, data center and systems. He said that having it all under Accenture helped facilitate the process without much turnaround time. According to Maganti, Accenture only had 90 days to develop the entire IT infrastructure now in place.

"It was a seamless integration," Maganti said. "As they fine-tune their business process and add more value to their portfolio, Accenture will be there working with them and building our great relationship to continue to deliver applications and infrastructure."

Hostess Brands commended Accenture's work, saying that it allowed the company to expedite the Twinkie revival in time for the back-to-school season. The Twinkie briefly exited the market in November 2012 as parent company Hostess Brands filed for bankruptcy. It made a return to shelves on July 15.

"Accenture played an invaluable role in helping bring these much-loved products back onto store shelves and into the hands of U.S. consumers. The speed and precision of the delivery was crucial, so that our products were available for the back-to-school sales period," Dean Metropoulos, owner and CEO of Hostess Brands, said in a statement. "Within the first two weeks of reintroducing Twinkies to the shelf, we had five times more Twinkies on the market than during the same period last year, and Accenture played its part in helping us make this the sweetest comeback in the history of ever."

PUBLISHED SEPT. 9, 2013