With data and ana­lyt­ics, busi­ness process improve­ment, automa­tion, appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment and inte­gra­tion, arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and more, the SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form (BTP) is foun­da­tion­al for orga­ni­za­tions with exist­ing and new SAP land­scapes that strive to become ever more intel­li­gent enterprises. 

Swift Pre­pared Foods looks to do just that, yet focused first on press­ing prob­lems, like pork pric­ing. In this inter­view Matt Golds­by, Swift Pre­pared Foods Senior IT Direc­tor, describes para­me­ters of the chal­lenge, what SAP BTP deliv­ers, and what ​‘s next for SAP tech­nol­o­gy at the food company.

This is an edit­ed ver­sion of our conversation. 

Ques­tion: Can you tell us about Swift Foods’ SAP landscape? 

Answer: We are cur­rent­ly an SAP ECC 6 and are on our way to SAP S/4HANA. We will be mak­ing the tran­si­tion in Feb­ru­ary 2023. We’re a sub­sidiary of JBS USA Foods. Swift Foods has our own SAP envi­ron­ment with­in the JBS instance of SAP. We may use the same mod­ules, but don’t use the same mod­ules between busi­ness units. SAP BTP hap­pens to be one that I am using exclu­sive­ly with­in Swift Pre­pared Foods.

Q: What prob­lems did you fix by imple­ment­ing the SAP BTP?

A: As with any­thing else, a prob­lem brings you to a solu­tion, and SAP BTP was our solu­tion. The prob­lem was the way that our mar­ket­place works in pric­ing. We work in a com­mod­i­ty mar­ket. Bacon is where we have the largest invest­ment in the SAP BTP world right now. Bacon is, as you know, a prod­uct of a pork bel­ly. Pork bel­lies are trad­ed on the exchange dai­ly — those fluc­tu­a­tions in the mar­ket impact the con­sumer’s price.

Typ­i­cal­ly, a retail­er will want to come up with a way to flat­ten that curve. For exam­ple, they might use a for­mu­la that looks at the last three weeks of pork bel­ly prices, aver­ages those prices, and then uses the aver­age for the next week’s pric­ing. But, they want the prices to be by the pound, not by case. And then you’ll have anoth­er retail­er who will flip that around eight dif­fer­ent ways and come up with dif­fer­ent per­mu­ta­tions. If you can imag­ine and extrap­o­late the num­ber of retail­ers we have across the num­ber of prod­ucts that we pro­duce, you can see where an SKU-by-SKU pric­ing sce­nario could become quite tedious and quite challenging.

We have our pric­ing per­son, a fan­tas­tic resource. She has been with us for 20 years. She spent between 30 and 40 hours a week exclu­sive­ly set­ting up the pric­ing records in SAP VK 11. The goal was not to replace her but to use the knowl­edge that she acquired over the years and to get her to bring more val­ue to oth­er areas of the orga­ni­za­tion instead of doing this tedious work. We want­ed to repur­pose her skillset. We stum­bled across a con­sul­tant, Blue Boot, and dis­cussed imple­ment­ing SAP Cloud Plat­form — now SAP BTP — with them. We end­ed up look­ing at this solu­tion from the SCP per­spec­tive, which took this out of SAP. Our appre­hen­sion was how do we cre­ate this solu­tion side of SAP with all the ABAP code changes, all the busi­ness units that we have with­in our instance, and the regres­sion test­ing that would take place just to make sure that we did­n’t break some­thing. That mas­sive effort became pret­ty sim­ple when looked at through the lens of the SAP BTP. 

We cre­at­ed this solu­tion with Blue Boot set up a one time for­mu­la for a retail­er. That for­mu­la can be fair­ly sim­ple, or it can be incred­i­bly com­plex. It’s dynam­ic. We cap­ture the mar­ket prices dai­ly and put them on a table. All of that is done auto­mat­i­cal­ly in the back­ground. Unless a change is made to that form between the account man­ag­er of our com­pa­ny and the retail­er, there’s no need to touch it because it auto­mat­i­cal­ly rolls, recre­ates, and ter­mi­nates the pre­vi­ous record. It also expires and adds a new record and pric­ing with­out a human hav­ing to intervene.

It’s very, very accu­rate. So that’s anoth­er prob­lem solved. With the scale of what I had just described, you can imag­ine that the pos­si­bil­i­ty of intro­duc­ing an error is high.

There were times we intro­duced errors and we charged mil­lions of dol­lars for bacon or, con­verse­ly, hard­ly charged any­thing. Obvi­ous­ly, cus­tomers don’t like it when that hap­pens. It cre­ates work for both of us. Avoid­ing that extra work and sim­pli­fy­ing the process was a sig­nif­i­cant moti­va­tion for us.

Q: What are the three main ben­e­fits you’ve seen from the SAP BTP? 

A: It’s helped us bet­ter lever­age the skill sets of our team­mates and get them away from non-val­ue-added activ­i­ties. Addi­tion­al­ly, it helps us improve our effi­cien­cy and accu­ra­cy because we no longer have to key in so many fields of data man­u­al­ly. Before SAP BTP, we had a man­u­al mit­i­ga­tion for that SOX con­trol. It was all man­u­al. This allowed us to auto­mate that mit­i­ga­tion. So that was a huge ben­e­fit to our SOX jour­ney as well. 

Q: What were some of the chal­lenges you might have faced as you were imple­ment­ing the SAP BTP into your land­scape and how did you all go about over­com­ing them?

A: The chal­lenges we faced were the num­ber of per­mu­ta­tions our cus­tomers require from a pric­ing per­spec­tive. With great relief, I can say that the SAP BTP was very flex­i­ble with our devel­op­ing part­ner and us. It’s very elo­quent and inge­nious how we’re man­ag­ing that com­plex­i­ty in just a few SAP Fiori tiles. We’re able to accom­mo­date pret­ty much any request a cus­tomer has. In the future, we plan on lever­ag­ing SAP BTP in our sliced meat busi­ness, which is even more com­plex than bacon. 

Q: What advice do you have for SAP cus­tomers who either aren’t using it or are sit­ting there right now think­ing about how am I going to lever­age this solu­tion? Should I even lever­age it in my infrastructure?

A: Do not imple­ment tech­nol­o­gy for the sake of tech­nol­o­gy. I believe that tech­nol­o­gy should solve a prob­lem. If you have a prob­lem that is incred­i­bly com­plex and daunt­ing from a task or finan­cial per­spec­tive, see what some of these more spe­cial­ized solu­tions can do. What I enjoy the most about SAP BTP is not sweat­ing at all. SAP does­n’t sweat all this work in the cloud. If you’re already on your way to SAP S/4HANA, that’s great. SAP BTP is already SAP S/4HANA. It migrates very eas­i­ly and quick­ly. When you get to SAP S/4HANA, it’ll be there wait­ing for you, and you can turn it on. What­ev­er the hes­i­ta­tion, I think break­ing prob­lems down and assign­ing the appro­pri­ate amounts of tech­nol­o­gy for that prob­lem is not just smart for SAP BTP. It’s smart across the land­scape, but SAP BTP fills that void quite nicely.

Stay informed about the lat­est SAP BTP devel­op­ments by explor­ing our curat­ed insights and check out our SAP BTP con­tent col­lec­tion.