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Customer Stories

Blue Diamond Growers: Improving operations to support more than 3,000 cooperative members

Explore Blue Diamond Grower’s journey with SAP

With a keen focus on continuous product development and operational efficiency, Blue Diamond Growers sought an intelligent infrastructure for ERP. SAP S/4HANA along with SAP Enterprise Support met these needs, helping take the cooperative’s demand and supply planning to the next level.

2

days for broker settlement, down from weeks.

54

%

reduction in downtime during conversion to SAP S/4HANA.

40

%

reduction in financial closing time.

Close collaboration with the SAP Enterprise Support advisory team through learning assets, valuable services, and expert sessions empowered our project team, allowing us to stay on target for a smooth, secure deployment of SAP S/4HANA.

Steve Birgfeld
Vice President Information Technology and Services
Blue Diamond Growers

The Challenge

Harnessing an intelligent infrastructure for ERP to support growth

Innovation is at the core of the Blue Diamond Growers cooperative – just check out the world’s first “almond innovation centre” it runs.

 

Knowing that technology supports product development and operational efficiency, Blue Diamond Growers desired an intelligent infrastructure for ERP that would support business growth, continuous digitalisation and innovation, and a harmonised and efficient software environment. It also wanted to integrate new solutions to enhance supply chain planning, procurement, and analytics while optimising processes to maximise returns, especially in the lower-margin global ingredients division.

 

The agricultural cooperative sought expert assistance to help it steer all the elements of this critical project and reap maximum value from the new software for its 3,000 members.

By integrating SAP S/4HANA, SAP IBP for Supply Chain, and SAP Analytics Cloud, we have created the perfect conditions for an intelligent, data-driven cooperative that provides the best value for our growers.

Steve Birgfeld
Vice President Information Technology and Services
Blue Diamond Growers

The Solution

Deploying an intelligent ERP for streamlined processes

Blue Diamond Growers worked with Accenture and The Silicon Partners Inc. to deploy SAP S/4HANA, the SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain (SAP IBP) solution, SAP Ariba solutions, and SAP Analytics Cloud solutions. These solutions provided embedded analytics, from inventory to financials to logistics, letting users quickly drill down to data.

 

The cooperative also relied on SAP Enterprise Support services, including personalised onboarding, a tailored engagement plan, and “journey checks” for technical guidance, during the project. This helped identify and resolve financial data consistency issues, highlight technical downtime drivers, and minimise downtime.

 

To support adoption, Blue Diamond Growers turned to the SAP Enterprise Support Academy program to provide learning and enablement and the SAP Early Adopter Care program to simplify projects, aid innovation, and accelerate digitalisation.

The Result

Saving time and mining insights from data with integrated solutions

Now that SAP S/4HANA is integrated with SAP IBP, it has enabled a single source of truth for demand and supply planning and aided production planning at Blue Diamond Growers. A user-friendly dashboard helps supply chain teams forecast demand more accurately and manage supply and demand more effectively.

 

With SAP Analytics Cloud, finance experts can access deeper insights for better decisions and benefit from smoother processes such as financial closing. This is because one task now takes 20 minutes instead of six hours. In addition, 50 new capabilities in the SAP Fiori user experience help users streamline tasks.

 

On the sales side, teams have an integrated view of customer orders and behaviour and can create and manage contracts with just a few clicks. Further integration with SAP Ariba solutions has simplified tasks across procurement, accounts payable, and invoice management.

SAP helps Blue Diamond Growers run better

Key business outcomes and benefits

  • More-transparent demand and supply planning with an enhanced ability to forecast demand
  • Less human error aided by increased automation
  • Time savings and greater efficiencies, such as streamlined sales processes and financial closing
  • Improved access to data and the ability to analyse data
  • Better user experience and less time spent processing general ledger upload documents

Featured solutions and services

  • SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain helps ensure business continuity in times of supply chain disruption by synchronising supply chain planning in real time, from S&OP to inventory supply planning.
  • SAP Analytics Cloud combines business intelligence, augmented and predictive analytics, and planning capabilities into one cloud environment, supporting advanced analytics.
  • SAP Enterprise Support provides proactive, mission-critical support, empowerment, best practices, continuous improvements and value, plus application lifecycle management.

 

About Blue Diamond Growers

Blue Diamond Growers partners with hardworking growers to turn raw almonds into delicious and healthy snacks, beverages, and ingredients. To maximise the returns for each of its 3,000 members, the cooperative needs to continuously develop new products while operating as efficiently as possible.

Industry Region Company Size Partner
Agribusiness Sacramento, California 1,500 employees Accenture
Featured partner

Accenture plc is a multinational professional services company that specialises in IT services and consulting. It has just shy of 700,000 employees worldwide and 7,000 clients served throughout more than 120 countries. It works with 185 partners as well as 89 of the Fortune Global 100.

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