OVERVIEW
Food Manufacturing and Distribution
18,500 Employees
ERP Implementation
SAP S/4HANA cutover for procurement, plant operations, and finance
"For the first time, I could see which plants were ready and which were not three weeks before cutover, instead of finding out at go-live. That gave us time to send extra support to the at-risk sites before they became a problem. It’s how we execute every rollout now."
ERP Program Director
The Challenge
The company's last ERP launch hurt. Buyers couldn't raise purchase orders, plants held inventory they couldn't post, and finance closed the quarter late. Leaders blamed training. Employees had sat through classroom sessions, then received a login and a hotline number.
The new S/4HANA program covered 9,200 people in 14 countries. Many were on shop floors or without a desk, making them hard to reach. The program team had only one change lead and a systems integrator focused on configuration, plus a hard cutover date tied to fiscal year-end.
The Approach
Mapping 46 roles to the three to eight transactions each performs weekly.
Building role-based practice in short bursts, delivered by mobile and shared plant terminals in local languages.
Scoring readiness by plant and role each week ahead of cutover to flag at-risk sites early.
Targeting supervisors and super-users first to cultivate champions, then sending personalized nudges to each user before go-live.
Opening a floor-walker channel for questions during hypercare, with answers routed to the right team within hours.
Results & Impact
Cutover went live on schedule at all 22 plants. Practice completion hit 93% before go-live, and support tickets in month one fell 41% against the previous launch. Order-to-cash speed recovered in six weeks, compared with five months during the last ERP transformation.
Finance closed the first quarter on time. The program team redirected the budget planned for extended hypercare into a second wave covering demand planning.
"Plant supervisors get quick walkthroughs for the exact transactions they would run day by day, in their language, on the device they already carry on the floor. That beat any classroom session we could have flown them out to. It also meant we could see, plant by plant, who was actually ready."
VP of Operations Excellence
Looking Ahead
The company is applying the same playbook to wave two: warehouse management and demand planning across nine more sites. Plans include a live readiness scorecard for the executive team, a permanent super-user network, and in-app guidance for seasonal workers joining each summer.
