ofi: Automating business processes for greater operational efficiency
Explore ofi’s journey with SAP
ofi, a global leader in naturally good food and beverage ingredients, sought to optimize its supply chain across more than 120 processing and manufacturing facilities and its value chain spanning more than 50 countries. To get there, ofi adopted multiple SAP solutions to remaster supply chain management, enabling more efficiency, visibility, and transparency.
| Industry | Region | Company Size | Partner |
| Consumer products | Singapore | ~18,000 employees | Mindsprint Pte. Ltd. |
reduction in monitoring efforts, thanks to dashboards.
of effort per month expected to be saved across the company.
reduction in realized integration effort.
Vice President, Information Technology, ofi
Increasing operational efficiency across a massive value chain
ofi is at the forefront of consumer trends, working closely with manufacturers and retailers to provide the ingredients they need to create products that delight their customers. For ofi, delight goes beyond taste; the company is committed to making a positive impact on people and the planet.
One of the major challenges ofi faced was managing its complex global supply chain efficiently. As a company involved in multiple stages of the agricultural value chain, ofi needed to streamline its operations, enhance visibility, and improve collaboration with its network of suppliers, farmers, and customers. The goal was to digitalize and optimize its supply chain management processes, ensuring comprehensive visibility and transparency.
To achieve this aim, ofi turned to SAP S/4HANA as a strategic solution. In doing so, the company experienced the benefits of greater efficiency by standardizing processes based on proven best practices.
Wanting to further enhance operational excellence, ofi partnered with Mindsprint Pte. Ltd., a leading provider of innovative, industry-specific digital solutions and services. This collaboration aimed to optimize ofi’s service delivery to customers, suppliers, and internal stakeholders by identifying opportunities for business process automation, process integration, and solution extension.
ofi chose SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) as an enabler of innovation. Recognizing the pitfalls of excessive customization in maintaining a flexible application architecture, ofi embraced a development philosophy based on minimal customization.
With a focus on rapid innovation, ofi used prebuilt templates and tools offered by SAP BTP, shortening the time from idea to implementation to just weeks. Low-code/no-code offerings provided a natural fit, empowering users to contribute to the development process.
To accommodate ofi’s ongoing growth, scalability was also a critical factor. SAP BTP addresses this need by supporting expansion without sacrificing performance. Additionally, ofi prioritizes a modern user experience, and the user interface modernization tools on SAP BTP facilitate intuitive and engaging interface development, which in turn improves user adoption and productivity.
After achieving these benefits, ofi looked for further ways to optimize the business.
Vice President, Enterprise Application Services, Mindsprint Pte. Ltd.
Taking enterprise automation and digital transformation to the next level
Issuing certificates of analysis is a key step in the handling of several ofi products, including cocoa. Recognizing the opportunity to streamline the business process with automatic certificate issuance, the Mindsprint team looked to the SAP Build Process Automation solution and SAP Integration Suite, both part of SAP BTP. Thanks to the intuitive design and user interface, ofi realized fast time to value in terms of speed to learn and implement SAP Build Process Automation. As a test site, one cocoa processing plant in the Netherlands provided an ideal use case for the trial run to optimize a wide range of operations. In another instance, process automation was applied to material expiry-date correction. The figure below shows the workflow of operational processes enabled by the solution.
At ofi, integration scenarios go far beyond issuing certificates of analysis. In its complex global systems landscape, SAP Integration Suite connects more than 80 applications across more than 1,200 interfaces. A prime example of this integration flexibility is ofi’s third-party customer relationship management service. It connects to SAP S/4HANA and commodity trading risk management systems for master data management and business process integration through SAP Integration Suite.
In another example, in a little over six weeks, ofi connected SAP Integration Suite with the Indian government’s goods and services tax (GST) service for tax reporting and management. Likewise, the company managed outbound logistics execution through a third-party transportation management system, using SAP Integration Suite for simplified integration to SAP S/4HANA, which involved more than 20 interfaces.
Trading partner management is another domain where API management through SAP Integration Suite simplified the integration of external applications while helping the company readily comply with security policies.
A core task in the execution of customer orders is the allocation of product batches. This task is performed by expert planners who execute these orders using SAP S/4HANA. In the past, this activity was manual and relied heavily on human judgment, oftentimes leading to errors and nonoptimal utilization of inventory or other factors, including seasonal influences.
Recognizing the potential to supplement batch-allocation capability, ofi designed and deployed a hybrid batch-allocation, microservice-based solution. This helps planners allocate semifinished or finished goods batches manually or automatically to the respective sales contract or spot sales order based on the specifications defined by the contract. The flexible solution reduces manual effort by implementing business logic into a rule-based engine, helping identify seasonal patterns and behaviors to effectively use inventory.
Vice President, Information Technology, ofi
Improving efficiency and customer experience through automation
The automated issuing of ofi’s cocoa certificate of analysis with SAP Business Process Automation has saved 30 hours of effort per month per plant. There’s been fewer complaints, and optimal service delivery is a possibility, all the while keeping customizations to a minimum. Beyond this, ofi has applied process automation to more than 20 business scenarios, including for data entry across systems, data manipulation and formatting, alert and notification management, and reporting automation.
In terms of integration, ofi has seen manifold benefits from choosing SAP Integration Suite. Go-lives are realized faster, with the India GST six-week implementation being a prime example. Monitoring today through dashboards presents a modern experience, and mobile capability provides ofi with the right information at the right time. Multiple open connectors mean scale is no concern, and better exception handling allows the company to confidently take corrective action.
In the case of trading partner management, with SAP Integration Suite, ofi reduced the effort involved in realizing this integration by 30%, with 40 trading partners onboarded in fewer than three months. Monitoring efforts have also been cut by 20%.
ofi’s new batch-allocation solution based on SAP BTP combines business rules and machine learning to optimize inventory management. The system automates batch allocation to sales contracts, considering factors such as compatibility and expiry. It has reduced monthly process time by 98 hours, minimized errors, and improved customer satisfaction through precise batch-to-contract matching. Offering both automated and manual options, the solution provides flexibility for planners while leveraging machine learning to identify seasonal allocation patterns. ofi sees potential to expand this efficient microservice across other business lines, further enhancing operational benefits.
Pursuing greater efficiency across the company
ofi now seeks to adopt and deploy more automation capability and use cases. This includes scaling the benefits realized in pilot implementations by rolling out the solutions across the business. The company estimates that when additional automation scenarios in quality, production, and finance are implemented, it will yield 1,352 hours per month in operational efficiency.
The company also plans to use process mining with the SAP Signavio portfolio, which will serve as a means of identifying optimization opportunities.
In partnership with Mindsprint, ofi intends to continue adopting SAP solutions in its ongoing journey to become a future-ready enterprise.
Featured partner
Mindsprint is a leading technology and business services firm that provides impact-driven solutions to businesses, enabling them to outpace the speed of change. Mindsprint collaborated closely with ofi and guided the company to take advantage of multiple SAP solutions to optimize supply chain management.