Sargento Foods: Using innovation in enterprise architecture practices to help support data compliance and legal discovery initiatives
Extending the family promise to data protection
Sargento Foods Inc. is a third-generation producer of natural, premium cheese. In keeping with its “family promise” motto, Sargento wanted to better manage consumer and employee data. With SAP LeanIX solutions, it can apply priority tags for electronically stored information and governance, risk, and compliance across its applications, data objects, and interfaces.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Consumer products | Plymouth, Wisconsin | 2,500 employees |
Enterprise Architect, Sargento Foods Inc.
Protecting personal and digital information
Sargento Foods Inc., a family-owned, private company from Wisconsin, has been producing natural, premium cheese for North American consumers since 1953. Having pioneered the introduction of prepackaged sliced and shredded natural cheeses, it also manufactures snack products and ingredients.
As a result of the California Consumer Privacy Act and broader privacy regulations in the United States, Sargento had to carefully manage personally identifiable information (PII) across multiple systems. And it needed to look at how it handled electronically stored information (ESI) for legal holds and discovery actions. ESI includes Microsoft Word documents and Microsoft Excel–based spreadsheets as well as text and voice messages. Tim Terry, enterprise architect at Sargento, explains, “One of the big questions when we talk about protecting the system of record is ‘Where does that data go?’”
Sargento was relying on manual spreadsheets and Microsoft Teams chats as well as e-mail chains to track compliance data. While its applications and data objects were constantly evolving, its static documentation made updates and audits difficult. The company’s innovation pillar, which was initially focused around product development and packaging, shifted toward digital transformation for its compliance data. To achieve this, both its legal and its governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) teams needed visibility into data privacy, discovery, and preservation.
Enterprise Architect, Sargento Foods Inc.
Tagging priorities in applications, data objects, and interfaces
Sargento Foods has been using SAP LeanIX solutions for several years to better manage its enterprise architecture. The food company created a live, dynamic architecture repository to replace static tracking, and it extended the metamodel in SAP LeanIX to include compliance-specific attributes.
With the tagging system, Sargento can apply priority tags for ESI and GRC across its applications, data objects, and interfaces. “Right from the start, we had an effective way of filtering our inventory so it was relevant to what we wanted to report, manage, and document,” says Terry. “We were also able to identify low-, medium-, and high-priority items.” The system can apply tags to multiple fact sheet types. For example, the data objects fact sheet is enhanced with taxonomy, classification, and multiselect fields for different types of PII. The application fact sheet updates include a data protection and compliance section with legal hold, archiving, deletion, encryption, integration, and backup policies. And the interface fact sheet improvements feature risk levels, connection attributes, and source and target tracking, including human interfaces.
Sargento called on the team delivering advisory services for SAP LeanIX use cases to assist with the application fact sheet in particular. According to Terry, “The team acted as great advocates—providing lots of brainstorming, ideation, and best practices.”
Enterprise Architect, Sargento Foods Inc.
Promoting proactive risk management and compliance tracking
Centralizing compliance data in a live repository allows Sargento to clearly map data flows, ownership, and risk levels. It can rely less on manual document exports, which pose security risks, and static documentation. And it can provide matrix and table reports as well as risk profiling based on data sensitivity and interface security for its legal and GRC teams. This is also important for Sargento’s application owners, as it allows them to assess which interfaces are secure or at risk (none, low, medium, or high) based on the technology and data type. Terry highlights, “Thanks to a summarized view, we’re getting more perspective on our risk levels and risk tolerance for the different consumption layers of our application data.”
Implementing SAP LeanIX solutions has enabled Sargento to engage in proactive risk management and compliance tracking. It can now make more-informed decisions in selecting vendors based on their compliance capabilities by reviewing agreements for alignment with its backup, retention, and archiving policies. The company has also identified automation and integration opportunities to reduce manual data handling and optimize its data landscape. It’s hoping to use SAP Build solutions for low-code, no-code development of reporting portals to share information with its nontechnical employees.
Enterprise Architect, Sargento Foods Inc.
Advancing data accuracy and accountability
Looking to the future, Sargento would like to expand its use of SAP LeanIX solutions so that nontechnical users can access compliance snapshots. It expects that the survey capabilities and solution enhancements will help it improve data accuracy and accountability. The company is also considering integrating the solutions with formal data governance tools from third parties for metadata and lineage tracking. Finally, Sargento is exploring the Electronic Discovery Reference Model for best practices in legal discovery.