SAP Application Support for Arla Foods

Arla Foods is an international cooperative based in Aarhus, Denmark. Among the cooperative dairy companies, Arla is the third largest in the world and the seventh largest dairy company measured by turnover. Arla Foods engaged with Bluestonex for the provision of third-party SAP application support during the transition of their UK SAP instance onto a global SAP platform. The transition was complicated in the fact that the vendor currently carrying out application support was in fact a competitor to Arla. Bluestonex included the provision of a long-term strategic roadmap for decommissioning the legacy UK SAP ECC instance, thereby helping Arla realise significant future savings to OpEx expenditure through the consolidation of their existing UK SAP footprint.

We believed that SAP application support should be viewed as an insurance policy by Arla. Our team of dedicated experts performed a thorough due diligence of the existing support model, business processes, configurations, end user traits, customisations and interfaces. We immediately identified areas that could be improved as part of the overall transition to our managed service, defining a cost-effective and comprehensive service level agreement framework to address Arla’s specific BAU needs.

Bluestonex adopted a user-first approach to application support provision and were proactive in both collaborating with Arla’s SAP user community and empowering key business users through mentoring workshops. Our ABF (Analysis Before Fix) approach addressed process improvements at source, thereby reducing the number of calls logged with the helpdesk in the long term. This included the establishment of a key user community and cataloguing of existing training documentation that underpinned the execution of key business processes. This approach helped us deliver an overall call reduction of 10% in overall calls.

Whilst Bluestonex were primarily responsible for ensuring that the SAP application environment was in a stable production state, strategic advice was given in order to streamline the transitional phase to Arla’s global SAP model and minimise the impact posed by shifting towards more standard SAP application adoption. This included process automation for activities previously carried out by Arla’s internal SAP support team and highlighting processes which could be shut and moved out of the SAP landscape.