Steve Birgfeld, vice president of IT with Blue Diamond Growers, and Tushar Bhalla, chief technology officer with systems integrator CloudPaths, relate how Blue Diamond consolidated and digitized demand planning across two separate business units, to align with its enterprise resource planning suite from SAP.
Blue Diamond Growers is the world’s largest almond processor and marketer. It has two main businesses: its branded and packaged snack nuts line for store sales and its ingredients division, through which it supplies other food companies. It’s a cooperative consisting of some 3,000 almond growers, shipping to nearly 100 countries.
Blue Diamond needed a better way to manage supply in accordance with demand from both business lines, so that it could determine the optimal mix of product to distribute between the two.
The company was hampered by disparate systems for managing demand and supply. “We were looking for something to integrate well with SAP, to pull that all together for the entire corporation,” Birgfeld says. The ultimate goal was to achieve a new level of resilience and flexibility, along with the ability to generate multiple “what-if” scenarios for supply and demand situations.
CloudPaths, an SAP systems specialist, was the company’s choice of integrator for the project. “It had the expertise, depth and breadth to bring forward,” Birgfeld says.
Bhalla says the initiative was a journey, the aim of which went beyond migrating away from manual processes to enable business transformation. With the coming of the COVID-19 pandemic, Blue Diamond needed to step up its game with more frequent planning and execution of integrated business planning.
Blue Diamond now has a single source of information and one application within SAP supporting its IBP effort. The time needed to run scenarios has shrunk from six hours to around 20 minutes, Birgfeld says.
“We’ve got a great foundation in place, the pieces are there, and we continue to do adjustments accordingly,” he adds.