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Dole Packaged Food: Streamline SAP Material Master Creation Process

Dole Packaged Foods, LLC (DPF) offers a full line of healthy, nutritional packaged fruit products that makes it easy to add more sunshine to your day, every day. From packaged shelf stable fruit and frozen fruit, to healthy snacks and beverages, DPF is a world leader in bringing their product portfolio to North America and Europe. To help keep the sun shining everywhere, they’re committed to sustainability in all operations, focusing on four key pillars: water management, carbon footprint, soil conservation, and waste reduction. They ensure there’s vibrant goodness in each and every one of their products, so you can add sunshine to your day, every day.

The Business Challenge

  • Lengthy manual paper, email, and excel process for materials creation leading to higher operational costs and the likelihood of data integrity issues.
  • Lack of real-time visibility into the entire process.
  • Existing (New Information Request Form or NIRF) process took far too long because of siloed data varying between teams and experiences (SAP, Excel, Email, Paper).

The Situation

DPF, utilizes a portfolio of modern SAP S/4HANA based products to support all business functions in a highly automated and seamless manner. Even with the high levels of automation and platform sophistication throughout SAP platforms, the creation of material master data and associated approval processes remained a manually managed, non-systematized process. This made for a significant business inefficiency and, even worse, led to material master data errors.  DPF initially considered various MDM and MDG solutions, however, the cost associated with purchasing and implementing these solutions proved impractical. Also considered was building a custom solution using the readily available SAP development tools, however, this proved to be too cumbersome to scale and sustain. User experience, powerful workflow capabilities, integration to SAP and system performance were key requirements. Additionally, the speed to build and deploy was a serious consideration. It was also imperative that the solution be sustainable and modifiable as new requirements surface. The application needed to provide a robust data validation and staging functions prior to the final approvals and pushing (creating) the material(s) in SAP.

“Pillir’s platform is a powerful portion of our overall enterprise suite of solutions.  Pillir solution enable us to consistently develop and deploy high quality, spot web and mobile applications that provide great usability, specific features and capabilities that much higher cost options typically deliver.  The native, real-time, in and out integration to our core SAP S/4HANA (and ECC before it) transactional system is one of the key strengths of the platform – but I would also say the speed and agility in which they can get these solutions delivered as well.
Gabe Dellevigne, Head of Digital Transformation, Dole Packaged Foods

The Solution

  • Using the Pillir's platform they designed, built and deployed a custom web app with a user-centric, customized experience that tightly integrates to SAP and digitized every role and workflow across the entire materials creation process – not just the ones that existed within SAP.
  • Hosted on Pillir’s cloud based SaaS solution, with no infrastructure or operational overhead added to DPF’s plate – a simple user based pricing model for a fully customized enterprise scale application.
  • Trained DPF team on the use of Pillir’s EdgeReady Cloud for additional application development projects.

You can hear from Gabe Dellevigne the Head of Digital Transformation himself in this video

Business Value

 

SAP business process efficiency and productivity

Process and productivity efficiencies were gained, resulting in near real-time updates into SAP and enabling visibility across teams with improved reporting capability.  Reduced duration associated with material master inception to creation in SAP with a further reduction of 30% of the manual labor being done prior to the app roll out. 

Minimal ABAP Development

Quick deployment with no infrastructure investments or people overhead for operational costs. Customized capability and deployment done rapidly with minimal ABAP development resources and very little programming. Significant reduction of maintenance time and effort for future enhancements and support.

Clean SAP core combined with customized user experience
SAP maintained as core system of record but kept as standard and close to best practices for existing processes as possible – while still having customized user-centric experiences for edge use cases and processes

 

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Irit Gillath

Irit Gillath

Irit is tech-savvy digital marketer, who is obsessed with growing companies. With a background in product and partner management, Irit enjoys writing on the ERP low-code market and industry trends