Blue Diamond Growers: Building out a digital core with data, analytics, and automation capabilities
Explore Blue Diamond’s journey with SAP
Blue Diamond Growers, the world’s largest almond marketer and processor, wanted to increase efficiency to maximize the return for its nearly 3,000 grower-owners. The co-op chose the SAP Signavio Process Insights and SAP Build Process Automation solutions to identify process improvement opportunities and enable automation capabilities, respectively. And SAP Integration Suite connects several SAP and third-party solutions.
| Industry | Region | Company Size | Partner |
| Consumer products | Sacramento, California | 1,600 employees | The Silicon Partners Inc. |
innovation opportunities identified, including 100 recommendations.
process improvements delivered.
hours saved annually in the ocean freight process.
Vice President, Information Technology and Services, Blue Diamond Growers
Seeking strong business insights and performance improvements
Blue Diamond Growers is a 114-year-old agricultural co-operative and global consumer packaged goods company comprised of nearly 3,000 grower-owners in California. It produces the renowned flavored-almond snack nuts, Almond Breeze® almondmilk, and Nut-Thins crackers and resells almonds to packaged goods companies to use in their products. Its mission is to maximize the return to its growers through constant innovation around the almond-based products.
The co-op envisioned an IT ecosystem where synchronized planning capabilities would constitute the overlying architecture. This would enable Blue Diamond to operate according to good insights on demand, supply, logistics, and manufacturing and to understand how issues in one area might affect another. While emphasizing data and analytics in general for insights into top-line revenue, the co-op wished to embrace a dashboard concept to see how the business performed day to day. It wanted to know how it could help the bottom line by looking at opportunities for cost savings, such as using automation to reduce routine and manual tasks.
The co-op upgraded from SAP ERP Central Component to SAP S/4HANA as its digital core. It planned to further optimize and build on the foundation to ensure it made the most of the technology.
Vice President, Information Technology and Services, Blue Diamond Growers
Creating data, analytics, and automation capabilities
Blue Diamond deployed SAP Signavio Process Insights to initially examine 40 business processes. The solution, coupled with general process reviews, identified at least 100 recommendations and up to 400 additional AI, automation, and analytics opportunities. Building on its predominant use of SAP software, the co-op implemented SAP Build Process Automation to enable automation capabilities, working closely with the business units to understand their manual processes. Workshops with customer service representatives in the supply chain area revealed that the finance team had to manually review different documents and process the accounts payable to sales brokers monthly. In ocean freight, employees gathered up to 12 documents from SAP solutions and third-party sources for each order going to a container, carrier, or customer. These lead-to-cash processes were ideal for automation, allowing Blue Diamond to combine various documents in one place and send them out electronically.
With the SAP Signavio Process Insights solution, Blue Diamond can develop data and analytics dashboards for each line of business. For example, manufacturing can check asset uptime data and reasons for downtime, while supply chain can assess forecast accuracy. Both the branded and global ingredients segments can examine profit-and-loss data by customer and product. The intention is to create a single dataset to give management insights, such as the top 20 customers regardless of product silo. Steven Birgfeld, vice president of information technology and services at Blue Diamond, explains, “Now that we’ve got this strong SAP solution ecosystem, the data is mostly there, so it’s just a matter of pulling it together according to what the business wants to see.”
The co-op has used the SAP Analytics Cloud solution on SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) as its key presentation layer since 2018. The solution gathers information from SAP S/4HANA, asset management tools in plant manufacturing, and third-party trade promotions. By using SAP Integration Suite to integrate SAP Analytics Cloud with SAP Build Process Automation, the co-op can use reporting capabilities that automatically review thousands of transactions daily. The co-op also combines data from the SAP Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain (SAP IBP) solution with the planning capabilities in SAP Analytics Cloud to determine how fluctuations in volume might impact financial performance. With cloud-based processes and real-time functionality, SAP Integration Suite has been a core component, connecting SAP S/4HANA with SAP Ariba solutions and SAP IBP, respectively. Data management capabilities in SAP HANA Cloud enabled data storage and harmonization. See the figure for the IT architecture.
The Silicon Partners has been the primary partner of Blue Diamond since helping with the migration to SAP S/4HANA. The consultancy provides ongoing support, including guidance and build-out around opportunities to use SAP BTP. The partner helped implement SAP Integration Suite and the automation project and also conducted training.
Vice President, Information Technology and Services, Blue Diamond Growers
Improving processes and excelling in customer service
Of the 500 innovation opportunities identified by SAP Signavio Process Insights, Blue Diamond has delivered up to 30 process improvements to date. This includes some recommendations around the SAP Fiori user experience and transaction codes. “On time in full,” or “OTIF,” is the co-op’s main KPI aimed at getting a full order to a customer on time, and it’s focusing on how it can improve that metric. The work in the sales brokerage and ocean freight areas contributed to improving the OTIF measure, placing Blue Diamond above industry standards.
The automations have brought tangible benefits. Errors are reduced in sales brokerage and more than 2,000 hours are saved a year in ocean freight (due to the number of shipments and hours per day traditionally spent pulling documents together). Employees are excited about the existing deliverables from automation and its prospects. They view it as positive because their time is tight and it allows them to work more proactively.
Adopting SAP S/4HANA and SAP Integration Suite has enabled Blue Diamond to take advantage of accelerated processes and harmonized experiences. Before, finance and other teams needed to wait every month to see how things were shaping up. Now, they can review trends in near-real time. Improving the OTIF metric and forecast accuracy means that leadership can focus more on industry-specific topics. Birgfeld concludes, “By having better customer service, people want to do business with us more. That translates to better returns for our growers, which is our key mission.”
Vice President, Information Technology and Services, Blue Diamond Growers
Strengthening data and analytics toward a synchronized vision
The big drive at Blue Diamond is to get better and stronger in data and analytics. The co-op is curious to see where AI will increasingly come into play and is exploring opportunities with crop forecasting and demand sensing to this end. Birgfeld asks, “Now that we have years of data, what can it do to help predict the future and improve our performance in general?”
Blue Diamond will continue its enterprise automation drive, shifting the focus from the supply chain to finance and other areas. It intends to use SAP Signavio Process Insights to contribute to continued insight by making some process improvements and then using the solution to see how the business adjusted. The co-op would like to increase connectivity to third-party applications, using SAP Integration Suite to integrate additional customer and co-manufacturer processes. It also hopes to improve monitoring and B2B capabilities and accelerate vendor onboarding.
In manufacturing, the production planning and detailed scheduling component for the SAP S/4HANA Manufacturing solution is on Blue Diamond’s road map. The finite scheduling can help complete the synchronized vision concept by adding improved manufacturing insights to the existing insights in demand, supply, and logistics. The co-op plans to explore sustainability through the SAP Environment, Health, and Safety Management application.
Featured partner
The Silicon Partners Inc. (TSP) was created from a successful IT services legacy of its founders and has over two decades of experience in enabling enterprise transformations. An SAP gold partner, TSP believes in helping its clients achieve their organizational vision and supports their mission by bringing together SAP software, robotic process automation, AI, machine learning, and the cloud.