Through its com­mit­ment to cul­ti­vat­ing with care as one of North America’s largest grow­ers, mar­ke­teers, and sell­ers of fresh and processed berry fruits, Naturipe Farms is a pio­neer­ing force in the fresh pro­duce industry.

Formed through a part­ner­ship between four dis­tinct berry grow­ing orga­ni­za­tions (Hor­tifruit S.A., Michi­gan Blue­ber­ry Grow­ers, Naturipe Berry Grow­ers, and Munger Farms), Naturipe cul­ti­vates blue­ber­ries, straw­ber­ries, black­ber­ries, rasp­ber­ries, cran­ber­ries, and avo­ca­does through an exten­sive net­work of growers. 

Man­ag­ing all oper­a­tions involved in bring­ing its pro­duce to mar­ket, from its fam­i­ly-owned farms to fam­i­ly tables, Naturipe’s scope encom­pass­es trans­porta­tion, dis­tri­b­u­tion, and sales, a sig­nif­i­cant under­tak­ing that pos­es logis­ti­cal chal­lenges across its sup­ply chain. 

To man­age growth while sus­tain­ing the cur­rent scale of its oper­a­tions, the grow­er-owned coop­er­a­tive lever­ages SAP appli­ca­tions includ­ing SAP S/4HANA, which it upgrad­ed to in 2018, a decade after first imple­ment­ing SAP ECC. 

“Our busi­ness is very com­plex,” Dario Cruz, Senior SAP Appli­ca­tion Devel­op­er at Naturipe Farms recent­ly told ASUG, in a dis­cus­sion focused on how the enter­prise man­aged the tech­ni­cal tran­si­tion of most of its appli­ca­tions from SAP Graph­i­cal User Inter­face (GUI) to SAP Fiori. 

In doing so, Naturipe shift­ed from a more tra­di­tion­al inter­face for inter­act­ing with SAP sys­tems to a mod­ern UI frame­work intend­ed to ensure a more con­sis­tent user expe­ri­ence. The orga­ni­za­tion did so with the inten­tion of imple­ment­ing SAP Fiori Launch­pad as the deliv­ery mech­a­nism for any new appli­ca­tion functionality. 

Along­side Cruz, ASUG spoke with Bri­an Gal­loway, Senior Tech­ni­cal Archi­tect at Naturipe, and Hus­sein Alaedin, Senior Appli­ca­tion Engi­neer at Naturipe, about how the enter­prise achieved suc­cess with SAP Fiori Launch­pad, work­ing toward clean­ing its core and even­tu­al­ly mov­ing the organization’s data back­end to stream­line its data access layer.

Tran­si­tion­ing from SAP GUI to SAP Fiori

For Naturipe to move prod­ucts through its far-reach­ing sup­ply chain and even­tu­al­ly into the hands of cus­tomers, it must reg­u­lar­ly engage a vari­ety of end-users with­in its ERP sys­tem; doing so required the cre­ation of var­i­ous inter­faces for those end-users to inter­act with.

Before upgrad­ing to SAP S/4HANA, the orga­ni­za­tion had devel­oped appli­ca­tions that enlist­ed SAP GUI to build a visu­al inter­face for users to inter­act with to access SAP appli­ca­tions, as well as Web Dyn­pro ABAP apps, to define how data would be defined and inter­act­ed with with­in that interface.

How­ev­er, with SAP S/4HANA in place, Naturipe could go fur­ther by imple­ment­ing SAP Fiori Launch­pad, an appli­ca­tion con­tain­er that could host mul­ti­ple SAP Fiori apps and serve as a cen­tral entry point for end-users, whether they were engag­ing SAPUI5 com­po­nents, Web Dyno ABAP com­po­nents, or oth­er applications.

Naturipe specif­i­cal­ly sought to lever­age appli­ca­tions with­in SAP Fiori Launch­pad to direct­ly engage with grow­ers and bet­ter man­age vital process­es, includ­ing liq­ui­da­tion, sales, and ware­house man­age­ment. With SAP S/4HANA and SAP Fiori Launch­pad imple­ment­ed, the cooperative’s devel­op­ment team could com­plete­ly move these process­es inside its SAP instance, sig­nif­i­cant­ly improv­ing effi­cien­cy and ease of access. 

“As UX devel­op­ers, we’re try­ing to ensure end-users have the same expe­ri­ences they have on social media or any oth­er appli­ca­tion they are using in their dai­ly lives,” Cruz said. 

Nav­i­gat­ing SAP Fiori Adop­tion Processes 

It wasn’t ini­tial­ly easy for Naturipe to ensure adop­tion of new SAP Fiori apps, accord­ing to Gal­loway, who recalls the ear­ly days of rolling out the apps less than positively.

The imple­men­ta­tion process involved con­sol­i­dat­ing a num­ber of com­plex process­es into stream­lined appli­ca­tion work­flows. Ship­ping the farms’ berries, for exam­ple, involves a vari­ety of process­es, which were reflect­ed by these work­flows; but end-users want­ed more sim­plic­i­ty, in the form of a sin­gle but­ton they could push to ini­ti­ate the ship­ping process. 

“Peo­ple are used to using a cer­tain appli­ca­tion a cer­tain way,” Gal­loway said. ​“A lot of peo­ple don’t like change.” 

Look­ing back, Gal­loway told ASUG, the devel­op­ment team could have focused more on exam­in­ing Naturipe’s exist­ing busi­ness process­es and adapt­ing them to adhere to SAP best prac­tices, as opposed to sim­ply attempt­ing to take exist­ing busi­ness process­es and ​“push them into SAP,” he said. 

Ini­tial­ly, adop­tion was slow; but as time went on, and Naturipe moved more apps to SAP Fiori and SAP UI5, it became a true ​“launch­pad” of func­tion­al­i­ty, Gal­loway said.

Improv­ing Naturipe’s Data Strategy

Dur­ing this imple­men­ta­tion process, Naturipe’s devel­op­ment team moved the organization’s back­end data method­ol­o­gy from ABAP Classes/​ABAP SQL to CDS Views/​AMDP and RAP, stream­lin­ing the organization’s data access layer. 

“We under­took this process because it made sense,” Gal­loway stated.

The orga­ni­za­tion had his­tor­i­cal­ly placed busi­ness log­ic in SQL queries and would run it in ABAP, SAP’s pro­pri­etary cod­ing lan­guage, accord­ing to Alaedin. How­ev­er, the busi­ness knowl­edge con­tained in that log­ic was thou­sands of lines of code long, and the team knew it could not lever­age ABAP to move all of this log­ic over to SAP S/4HANA, so it lever­aged CDS and AMDP to do so. 

While pre­vi­ous­ly using SAP GUI with­in SAP ECC, the com­pa­ny had kept sales, ven­dor, inven­to­ry, and invoice data all on dif­fer­ent servers. In mov­ing to SAP S/4HANA, the team was also able to migrate all that data to a sin­gle core, using CDS Views. ​“That changed the game for­ev­er,” Cruz said. ​“It’s a pow­er­ful tool.” 

Now, the team can pull any data from across the busi­ness into the mod­els they cre­ate. ​“We are not a com­plete SAP shop because SAP told us to be,” Gal­loway added. ​“Every­thing has been moved from out­side of SAP into it because the process just makes sense. If it didn’t work for us, we wouldn’t do it.” 

Lessons Learned for Oth­er Enterprises 

Based on their expe­ri­ence imple­ment­ing SAP Fiori Launch­pad, devel­op­ing appli­ca­tions, and rolling them out to Naturipe’s end-users, the devel­op­ment team also shared insights for oth­er enter­pris­es to con­sid­er before embark­ing on sim­i­lar imple­men­ta­tion projects. 

Gal­loway encour­aged enter­pris­es to engage with end-users ear­ly, learn their process­es, under­stand how apps can meet their spe­cif­ic needs, and even­tu­al­ly obtain their buy-in by shar­ing that knowl­edge, rather than expect­ing them to buy-in right away. 

Addi­tion­al­ly, the three devel­op­ers encour­aged com­pa­nies to take the oppor­tu­ni­ty, in upgrad­ing from SAP GUI to SAP Fiori — and from SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA — to eval­u­ate orga­ni­za­tion-wide busi­ness processes. 

“An upgrade is the best time in the world to change your busi­ness process­es,” Gal­loway said. ​“It’s a great time to imple­ment new changes.” 

One sug­ges­tion? Orga­ni­za­tions should strip out lega­cy code and process­es where pos­si­ble before mov­ing to SAP S/4HANA or com­plet­ing oth­er appli­ca­tion upgrades, he said; at most com­pa­nies, he said, out­dat­ed and dis­used process­es and code can remain in a company’s IT land­scape long after they become irrelevant.

“Nev­er stop ask­ing why,” Gal­loway added, refer­ring to the impor­tance of con­tin­u­ing to seek effi­cien­cies and ques­tion how and why process­es could improve. ​“Nev­er be complacent.”