This arti­cle men­tions ses­sions from a past event, you can find a recap of the con­fer­ence here. For a list of our upcom­ing in-per­son and vir­tu­al events, click here.

At Swift Pre­pared Foods, a sub­sidiary of JBS USA, pro­duc­ing food prod­ucts, such as sous vide entrees, bacon, canned hams, and deli meats, is all in a day’s work. 

As Matt Golds­by, Direc­tor of IT at Swift, will detail at the upcom­ing ASUG Best Prac­tices: SAP S/4HANA® and SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form (BTP) con­fer­ence (March 7 – 9, in Glen­dale, Ari­zona), acti­vat­ing the pow­er of SAP BTP has been instru­men­tal in unlock­ing Swift’s true busi­ness poten­tial while lever­ag­ing the economies of scale and pro­duc­tion opti­miza­tion enabled by JBS USA’s access to major world markets.

Golds­by, a vet­er­an of SAP tech­nol­o­gy since 2004, has man­aged full life­cy­cle imple­men­ta­tions of SAP and many periph­er­al mod­ules that sup­port and enhance the SAP work­space. Between his keynote address, ​“Acti­vate the Pow­er of SAP BTP to Accel­er­ate Inno­va­tion,” and anoth­er event ses­sion, ​“Automa­tion and Prob­lem Solv­ing with SAP BTP,” Golds­by will reflect on how Swift Pre­pared Foods has used BTP to save time and mon­ey while increas­ing accu­ra­cy and prepar­ing its glob­al orga­ni­za­tion for future dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion, includ­ing its very immi­nent go-live on SAP S/4HANA.

This is an edit­ed ver­sion of our conversation.

Q. How did you arrive at this place in your career where you’re simul­ta­ne­ous­ly work­ing on an SAP S/4HANA migra­tion and work­ing with­in BTP?

A. I’ve been very for­tu­nate to have been aligned with com­pa­nies that are for­ward-think­ing in terms of tech­nol­o­gy. It’s not uncom­mon for a tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny to spend 7% to 10% of its bud­get on tech­nol­o­gy ini­tia­tives. But you’re not going to find that in the con­sumer-pack­aged goods (CPG) or food and bev­er­age indus­try. We don’t spend num­bers approach­ing that, but I have been very for­tu­nate to have been aligned with com­pa­nies that pri­or­i­tize the enable­ment of tech­nol­o­gy and how it ben­e­fits the busi­ness. Per­son­al­ly, I draw a very dis­tinct line when it comes to imple­ment­ing tech­nol­o­gy: it has to serve the busi­ness pur­pose. There has to be a val­ue that we can imme­di­ate­ly asso­ciate, that can be artic­u­lat­ed, and that does­n’t require a bits and bytes degree to under­stand. That’s always one of my pet peeves — when my col­leagues speak over the busi­ness lead­ers’ heads, try­ing to artic­u­late a spe­cif­ic or asso­ci­at­ed busi­ness val­ue. It’s real­ly black and white and straight­for­ward to me. 

As for what dri­ves the con­ver­sa­tion, we are obvi­ous­ly in a very cost-sen­si­tive envi­ron­ment as of recent­ly. This year brings a lot of chal­lenges across our econ­o­my. I think you’re going to see a lot more ret­i­cence in spend­ing this year, and we’ve already seen huge amounts of cuts in per­son­nel in dif­fer­ent seg­ments and com­pa­nies. Some mar­quee cus­tomers or busi­ness­es have made broad announce­ments in that regard. When you have a more intro­vert­ed econ­o­my, you tend to be more focused and have a high­er pri­or­i­ty because the risk tol­er­ance goes way down. We have to be focused on that as an organization.

Q. What was Swift Pre­pared Foods’ path to BTP, specifically?

A. Organ­ic growth presents one chal­lenge, but growth by acqui­si­tion presents anoth­er chal­lenge. You get an amal­ga­ma­tion of busi­ness­es, plat­forms, and process­es between which there may not be a direct cor­re­la­tion. And yet, you have to main­tain cer­tain busi­ness­es for some peri­od of time. Inte­gra­tion of those busi­ness plat­forms is always a chal­lenge because you’re on this version/​platform, and they’re on that version/​platform. You make all kinds of con­ces­sions with a roadmap going for­ward. Every­body has prob­a­bly heard or been part of those conversations. 

I start­ed with Plum­rose USA, which is what Swift was for­mer­ly known as; it was held by Dan­ish Crown up until 2017. I was brought on in 2013 specif­i­cal­ly to imple­ment SAP for Plum­rose. Dan­ish Crown was an SAP shop, and Plum­rose had been a hold­ing of Dan­ish Crown for quite a while, yet the incon­sis­ten­cies between plat­forms didn’t allow for a lot of syn­er­gy between the par­ent com­pa­ny and Plum­rose. I was brought on in 2013, and we went live on SAP in 2015. We had $500 mil­lion in gross rev­enue and con­tin­ued to advance along in that regard with a pric­ing process that was fair­ly man­u­al. The mar­ket in meat pro­cess­ing is some­what dat­ed, with a lot of man­u­al process­es; the mar­ket fluc­tu­ates because pork bel­lies and mus­cles are still trad­ed on the mar­ket. There are the dynam­ics of cus­tomers want­i­ng to make sure that those are for­mu­la-based for food ser­vices, which is yet anoth­er mar­ket that’s chal­leng­ing to sell into when you’re deal­ing with meat products. 

The best way to accom­mo­date this had been to that point man­u­al; it was a world where pric­ing records were cre­at­ed man­u­al­ly, every day, for some peri­od of time. One indi­vid­ual, who has been with the com­pa­ny for a very long time, was respon­si­ble for all of the pric­ing. The man­u­al intro­duc­tion of pric­ing brought errors. Some­times, we would end up charg­ing cus­tomers mil­lions of dol­lars for a prod­uct that obvi­ous­ly was­n’t worth mil­lions of dol­lars. Con­verse­ly, they would get a prod­uct for pen­nies on the dol­lar. Not only is that not good for our finance teams, but it’s not good for the rela­tion­ship. Every­body wants to deal with a sup­pli­er they have con­fi­dence in. You always want to make sure you’re in the best pos­si­ble place and that your cus­tomers are con­fi­dent that you can car­ry out what­ev­er strat­e­gy they wish to car­ry out. 

Fast for­ward, and we con­tin­ue to evolve. We were acquired in 2017. JBS is very active in the tech­nol­o­gy are­na, so we intro­duced a lot of dif­fer­ent plat­forms. I moved for­ward with SAP Inte­grat­ed Busi­ness Plan­ning (IBP), SAP Busi­ness Tech­nol­o­gy Plat­form (BTP), and sev­er­al oth­er tech­nol­o­gy plat­forms that are SAP prod­ucts. With BTP, we want­ed to find a way to cre­ate a pric­ing process that didn’t involve a whole lot of devel­op­ment in our ECC plat­form, requir­ing ABAP, inte­gra­tion, test­ing, and regres­sion test­ing. Bear­ing in mind that JBS is a glob­al com­pa­ny, our instance of SAP ser­vices is the globe. Any­time you have a sit­u­a­tion like that, you approach these types of endeav­ors with a great deal more caution. 

Enter BTP. On the face of it, I said, ​“This is some­thing that lim­its our risks sub­stan­tial­ly. All of our heavy lift­ing can be offloaded into the cloud.” And we have a fan­tas­tic process now that allows us to cre­ate records for cus­tomers with a great deal of com­plex­i­ties. Our cus­tomers may want their next week’s pric­ing to be based on an aver­age of the last 12 weeks of data, but all of their orders are to be based on order date — not deliv­ery date, ship date, or any per­mu­ta­tion there­of. You have all of this com­plex­i­ty that is now being accom­mo­dat­ed in BTP. The pric­ing records are cal­cu­lat­ed auto­mat­i­cal­ly and then insert­ed into SAP with­out error, fuss, or muss. Not only did we elim­i­nate the trep­i­da­tion around the poten­tial for error, but we also freed up a very valu­able resource in that indi­vid­ual I men­tioned ear­li­er, who has an incred­i­ble amount of knowl­edge about busi­ness­es and process­es. This has allowed her to expand her depart­ment and devote more time to oth­er more val­ue-added areas. We’ve recent­ly added a fixed price com­po­nent; we did­n’t have that in our food ser­vice pre­vi­ous­ly, but we’ve become more active in the food-ser­vice area. Food ser­vice is yet anoth­er divi­sion of the mar­ket that com­mu­ni­cates dif­fer­ent­ly when it comes to pur­chas­ing, so we obvi­ous­ly had to be able to accom­mo­date their require­ments. It has worked out fan­tas­ti­cal­ly well for us.

Q. What do you remem­ber of devel­op­ing the ini­tial busi­ness case for BTP? 

A. First and fore­most, there was the lev­el of com­plex­i­ty. One of the val­ues we espouse here at JBS USA is ​“sim­plic­i­ty.” We have sev­en val­ues that dri­ve our every­day con­ver­sa­tions, and sim­plic­i­ty is one of those sev­en val­ues. Elim­i­nat­ing that com­plex­i­ty for intro­duc­ing new devel­op­ment or new tech­nol­o­gy was a huge deci­sion fac­tor. As I said, any­time we talk about intro­duc­ing any new devel­op­ment into our envi­ron­ment, every­body starts sweat­ing and wor­ry­ing more because now you have to regres­sion test. You’ve got all these dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies around the globe. I don’t even know the num­ber of com­pa­ny mem­bers in our instance off the top of my head anymore. 

You have those con­cerns when you’re talk­ing about intro­duc­ing new ABAP. Every­body in SAP says, ​“We don’t do any mod­i­fi­ca­tion. We’re tem­plate-dri­ven.” In my expe­ri­ence, that’s not true. I have yet to find a com­pa­ny run­ning SAP that has­n’t per­formed some Z code at some point. You have that to con­sid­er when­ev­er you intro­duce new devel­op­ment, and the effort around that was a deci­sion factor. 

The next deci­sion fac­tor was speed-to-mar­ket. Using Java-based devel­op­ment with­out hav­ing to wor­ry, thanks to ABAP, I can get to my goal faster and much more inex­pen­sive­ly. That was anoth­er huge fac­tor. The inter­face and UX on it were more or less up to us. Peo­ple com­plain a lot about some of the native screens with­in SAP, so you can use Fiori in dif­fer­ent per­sonas to mit­i­gate that. Here, we had this oppor­tu­ni­ty with BTP to total­ly dri­ve that con­ver­sa­tion and dri­ve that UX. Those were the areas that were most quick­ly avail­able to help us make that decision.

Q. The title of your ses­sion at the SAP S/4HANA and BTP Con­fer­ence is ​“Acti­vate the Pow­er of BTP to Accel­er­ate Inno­va­tion.” What does that mean to you? 

A. It cer­tain­ly cap­tures the essence of what we’re try­ing to accom­plish here. I also have oth­er plans for BTP that have not made it to the devel­op­ment table yet, but we have pur­chase orders that are now being man­u­al­ly updat­ed dai­ly because of the mar­ket changes. BTP would be able to go in and — using the mar­ket prices we’ve cap­tured from our com­mod­i­ty mar­kets part­ner Urn­er Bar­ry — update those pur­chase orders pain­less­ly and auto­mat­i­cal­ly with­out hav­ing a human do it. We con­tin­ue to find great oppor­tu­ni­ties with direct busi­ness val­ue for BTP, espe­cial­ly in this envi­ron­ment. Not that we weren’t sen­si­tive to it in the past, when there was a friend­lier mar­ket from a GDP stand­point, and we’re still doing well, but every­body is more con­scious now, of course. That said, it’s real­ly nice and refresh­ing to have oppor­tu­ni­ties like this, which have yet to be mined.

Q. I under­stand that Swift is also prepar­ing for an SAP S/4HANA migra­tion. Will you dis­cuss this at the conference?

A. The won­der­ful thing about BTP is that it’s run­ning SAP S/4HANA right now, at this moment. It’s about us catch­ing up and mak­ing sure that our con­nec­tions are moved away from our ECC plat­form to our SAP S/4HANA plat­form — that we get align­ment there. I plan on dis­cussing it. It’s still a bit of a TBD because I can’t tell the future, but we’re well-pre­pared. We’ve worked hard at all of our migra­tion activ­i­ties and our preparedness. 

I’m look­ing for­ward to hav­ing a very good sto­ry to tell, and I’m opti­mistic. The cloud plat­forms that I use to this point, I will say, have proven to be the least chal­leng­ing of our migra­tion activities.

We will go live on Feb. 20. That’ll be our first day of run­ning SAP S/4HANA. We’re right now in the final min­utes of the launch. This com­ing week­end will be our mas­ter data cutover, and the fol­low­ing week­end will be our big cutover. I’m not look­ing to sleep much over the next cou­ple of week­ends, but it should be ful­fill­ing. Swift Pre­pared Foods has six waves of SAP S/4HANA go-lives around the globe, which will extend in 2026, and Feb. 20 rep­re­sents our exe­cu­tion against wave one. We’re out front if you will.

Q. Are there any major take­aways you hope con­fer­ence atten­dees will have from your keynote?

A. One of my biggest take­aways regards the stig­ma asso­ci­at­ed with devel­op­ment endeav­ors in SAP, which have always been fraught with anx­i­ety and fear. I would like users to be able to take away that this was not very painful at all. It was actu­al­ly lib­er­at­ing and did not cre­ate the angst to the bal­ance of our SAP com­mu­ni­ty that a large-scale imple­men­ta­tion would have cre­at­ed. The free­dom and flex­i­bil­i­ty BTP brings to the table should empow­er peo­ple to take more chances because risk tol­er­ance is not very big at all. We should walk away say­ing, ​“Let’s at least try it in BTP.”