ABF Sugar: Innovating business processes to enhance operational performance and competitiveness with RISE with SAP
Accelerating ERP transformation with process intelligence
To improve business agility amid market volatility, ABF Sugar (Pty) Ltd., the African arm of a global sugar producer, embarked on a transformation to an SAP Cloud ERP application through the RISE with SAP journey. Needing to carry out its ERP transformation quickly and with confidence, the company adopted SAP Signavio Process Transformation Suite to optimize the redesign of core business workflows.
| Industry | Region | Company Size | Partner |
| Agribusiness | Durban, South Africa | 28,000 employees | SolArch Consulting CC |
faster process design.
boost in operational efficiency.
of finance and procurement processes standardized.
ERP Solutions Lead, ABF Sugar (Pty) Ltd.
Cultivating efficiency and agility for long-term resilience
ABF Sugar is part of a group of large sugar businesses committed to safely and responsibly harnessing natural energy to grow and transform sugar cane and beet into a range of sugars and diverse coproducts. Its sugar-processing plants are highly efficient biorefineries that enable the company to maximize each part of its raw material. Led by customer and consumer insight, ABF Sugar also cares about its people and the communities that it relies on for success, recognizing the important role that it plays in contributing to a thriving community.
In Africa, ABF Sugar has a footprint in Eswatini, Malawi, South Africa, Tanzania, and Zambia, as well as packing operations in Rwanda. In these countries, the company’s consumer brands are market leaders, including Bwana Sukari in Tanzania, Whitespoon in Zambia, and Illovo in multiple countries. The company also produces valuable coproducts from sugar production, including potable alcohol, furfural, and electricity for local grids.
In the face of increasing volatility and changing market dynamics, ABF Sugar in Africa decided the best way to build resilience and competitive advantage was to invest in a strategic transformation of its operating environment. To modernize operations, enhance process efficiency, and enable real-time decision-making across the production value chain, the company opted for a greenfield implementation of an SAP Cloud ERP application through the RISE with SAP journey.
It was critical for the company to avoid transferring process inefficiencies from the legacy system to its new environment. So, ABF Sugar first needed to evaluate its processes before moving to the cloud.
ERP Solutions Lead, ABF Sugar (Pty) Ltd.
Centering operations around continuous business process transformation
ABF Sugar’s adoption of RISE with SAP would allow it to take advantage of an AI-enabled and future-ready business foundation for new innovation initiatives and provide a scalable environment to support growth. The move would also significantly reduce the infrastructure management and maintenance burdens from the internal IT team because the core functionality is managed by SAP.
In addition, RISE with SAP offers access to an agent-led toolchain, including SAP Signavio solutions for use in business process transformation management. Because ABF Sugar lacked a central repository for its business process documentation, SAP silver partner SolArch Consulting CC proactively demonstrated the features of SAP Signavio Process Transformation Suite. Impressed by what they saw, the ABF Sugar team duly appointed the partner to implement the solutions for process modeling, process insights, process intelligence, and process collaboration.
The combination of RISE with SAP and SAP Signavio solutions gave ABF Sugar a solid foundation for adopting best practices for business processes while maintaining the flexibility to tailor processes to its specific needs.
Priesta Mhlongo, ERP solutions lead at ABF Sugar, comments, “Besides the implementation, SolArch was central to training everyone in the business and educating us on using the extensive features. The ability to publish processes to SAP Signavio Process Collaboration Hub meant our team could view and familiarize themselves with the processes and click through for process insight. This also assisted with the change management process and user adoption.”
When implementing subsequent release cycles of the ERP solution, SolArch helped the company review documented processes against how they were performed in the business. Using the accelerated process discovery service with SAP Signavio Process Transformation Suite, SolArch linked process intelligence investigations directly to live ERP data. Mhlongo adds, “This provided actionable insights, allowing us to identify our top KPIs and remap and optimize our processes accordingly.”
ERP Solutions Lead, ABF Sugar (Pty) Ltd.
Refining its competitive edge and business performance efficiency
ABF Sugar now uses process data to inform operational and strategic decisions. With its processes, KPIs, and transformation requirements now connected and in one place, it can prioritize decisions based on business value and not on assumptions.
This has helped it bring about shorter cycle times in core processes, such as procure to pay and order to cash, driving new levels of operational efficiency. The company has also adopted more touchless and automated transactions to reduce manual effort and associated errors.
As part of the transformation to RISE with SAP, ABF Sugar balanced standardization with differentiation. The company aligned 70% of finance and procurement processes with best practices while customizing the remaining 30% to fit its unique supplier dynamics.
Now operating with cloud-enabled business processes and real-time operational insights, the company has eliminated inefficiencies and adopted a continuous improvement culture. With renewed agility across the value chain, the business is more responsive and teams are aligned, with decision-making guided by data.
Mhlongo thinks that the process insights and process intelligence gained from SAP Signavio have delivered incredible value, enabling the business to see exactly how its processes are performing. She says that visualizing process data is supporting a better way of working by using it as a continuous monitoring tool to measure business performance based on specific KPIs. Business process transformation has also helped the company with compliance efforts and audit readiness. Mhlongo comments, “Because we’re running consistent and governed processes, we can quickly spot bottlenecks and deviations from the process standard and quantify the impact of an issue before we act on it. The recommendations we get from a system perspective enable us to make insightful decisions and continuously innovate in our environment.”
ERP Solutions Lead, ABF Sugar (Pty) Ltd.
Using process data to drive a culture of continuous improvement
ABF Sugar started its business process transformation journey with finance and procurement, allowing it to continuously optimize financial performance while maintaining control and strategic focus.
ABF Sugar is now looking to implement additional capabilities offered by SAP Signavio Process Transformation Suite, including the SAP Signavio Process Governance solution to automate process lifecycle management.
And through RISE with SAP, ABF Sugar has access to embedded AI and is in the process of activating the Joule solution to innovate more automated and increasingly self-optimizing processes. The aim is to deliver tangible benefits for users across the business through improved efficiency, faster insights, and simplified day‑to‑day work.
Featured partner
SolArch Consulting is a boutique consulting company and a preferred partner for SAP Signavio solutions globally. As well as implementing SAP Signavio Process Transformation Suite for ABF Sugar, SolArch was instrumental in training the internal team. SolArch also used the accelerated process discovery service with SAP Signavio Process Transformation Suite to connect SAP Signavio solutions to live ERP data, providing ABF Sugar with data clarity for operational and strategic decision-making.