Divestiture-Driven Data Yields Significant Cost Savings
Project Background
In undergoing a divestiture of its Canada Bread division, Maple Leaf Foods needed a quality-assured and efficient way to remove the Canada Bread data from its mission-critical SAP systems without deleting any Maple Leaf Foods data. It also required a solution to preserve the history of Canada Bread data post-divestiture.
After deleting substantial amounts of records, we’ve been able to reorganize our SAP databases and prepare for our upcoming deployment of SAP S/4HANA.”
The Company
Maple Leaf Foods Inc. is a leading consumer protein company, making high quality, innovative products under national brands including Maple Leaf®, Maple Leaf Prime®, Maple Leaf Natural Selections® , Schneiders®, Schneiders® Country Naturals® , Mina® and Lightlife®. Maple Leaf employs approximately 11,500 people and does business in Canada, the U.S. and Asia. The company is headquartered in Mississauga, Ontario and its shares trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange (MFI).
There were so many barriers and data rules in place within our SAP systems that manually deleting the Canada Bread data in our SAP systems would have been extremely time consuming, costly and difficult without the help of Syniti."
Project Background
Maple Leaf Foods has established itself as a market leader across many packaged protein brands and utilizes multiple SAP systems to store and manage its critical enterprise data. When the company divested its Canada Bread bakery division, it needed an effective way to remove the Canada Bread data across four distinct SAP environments, including systems for ERP, shopping carts (SRM), extended warehouse management, and CRM.
As the data for both companies was intermingled across each of these systems and without a straightforward way to separate the information, the company was facing a complex challenge in cleansing all Canada Bread data from its systems. Additionally, the threat of inadvertently deleting Maple Leaf Foods data posed a major risk to the company.
To address the divestiture data challenge, Maple Leaf Foods knew it needed the right partner and technology to automate the process. It needed a solution that could ensure the quality and integrity of the vast amount of data in the complex project with sophisticated data archiving objects capabilities to ensure reliability across the organization.
Implementation Highlights
Due to the complexity of the project — including vast amounts of interconnected data and embedded data rules across the SAP systems – Maple Leaf required an experienced partner and time-tested tool to ensure success. After evaluating possible technology tools available in the market, Maple Leaf engaged Syniti to take on the project with its Knowledge Platform and professional services team’s expertise.
Syniti was selected for its established track record with executing other divestiture carve out programs, including a specialization in automated archiving object capabilities. Customer references proved that their results-oriented approach generated measurable success. Beginning the project in March 2016, the Syniti team first provided a thorough evaluation of Maple Leaf Foods’ SAP environment, including identifying opportunities for reducing the company’s overall storage footprint and strategies for optimally reorganizing the SAP databases after deleting all Canada Bread data. Working collaboratively, the Maple Leaf Foods and Syniti teams successfully deleted the Canada Bread data and performed all necessary archiving steps by March 2017. They worked with C3 and auditing teams to ensure proper measures were taken for legal and internal compliance.
As a result of the one-year project, Maple Leaf Foods was able to delete 57% of the data in its production environment including removing over 45 billion records for a total of 88 terabytes of space saved. This represented the largest number of customer records deleted for a project in Synit’s history. As a result of the significant space savings, Maple Leaf Foods yielded over a million dollars in cost savings for anticipated future infrastructure. In addition, Syniti helped Maple Leaf Foods identify further reductions in its production storage used across its SAP environments of ECC6, SRM, CRM and Extended Warehouse Management by archiving data that was no longer needed for its day-to-day operations.
Finally, the Maple Leaf Foods team has seen process improvements as a result of reducing its storage footprint and been able to apply the knowledge it gained on archiving best practices for long-term results. “There were so many barriers and data rules in place within our SAP systems that manually deleting the Canada Bread data in our SAP systems would have been extremely time consuming, costly and difficult without the help of Syniti,” said Vicky Pasqualini, Director of ERP Integration and Release Management, Maple Leaf Foods. “After deleting substantial amounts of records, we’ve been able to reorganize our SAP databases and prepare for our upcoming deployment of SAP S/4HANA.”
Why Syniti
Maple Leaf Foods chose Syniti for the company’s proven track record with Merger & Acquisition data projects for other consumer packaged goods (CPG) customers, as well as its extensive SAP systems and SAP archiving knowledge. Syniti spearheaded the full SAP landscape transformation and collaborated with SAP’s project managers to ensure governance and alignment for the duration of the project.
Synit’s Knowledge Platform and professional services team:
- Quickly assessed Maple Leaf Foods’ SAP systems and needs
- Generated an expert roadmap for executing the divestiture data-driven carve out project
- Delivered a seamless approach to extracting the vast amount of Canada Bread data from all intermingled Maple Leaf Foods SAP systems.
- Empowered Maple Leaf Foods’ team to optimize the overall IT landscape and then reorganize its ERP system in preparation for future SAP S/4HANA adoption.
Results
Utilizing Syniti’s Knowledge Platform and consulting services, Maple Leaf Foods successfully and quickly removed Canada Bread data records from its vast SAP systems while maintaining the integrity of all Maple Leaf Foods data within the same systems. The project was completed within one year, under budget and generated millions of dollars in cost savings as well as significant ROI.
Key benefits include:
- Reduced storage across the SAP landscape by 88 terabytes — eliminating over a million in anticipated future infrastructure costs
- Employed innovative, best-practice data archiving technology to ensure 100% accuracy in only removing Canada Bread data
- Deleted over a 45 billion records from production
- Established readiness for a smaller SAP S/4HANA environment, generating considerable savings on S/4HANA appliances and implementation costs
- Reduced information backup times and costs
- Optimized business results driven by a better quality production landscape, allowing for more regular QA and test environment copies from production