Food & beverage

SAP rollout across a multi-subsidiary perimeter

Roll out a shared SAP core across several subsidiaries of a group, harmonising processes without erasing what is specific to each.

SAP rollout
Process harmonisation
Change management
Data migration

Industrial processing site with distributed facilities

Context

A food and beverage group organised into several subsidiaries, each with its own management tooling and its own working habits. Purchasing, production, inventory and finance processes differed from one subsidiary to the next, item and supplier reference data had drifted apart, and the group’s consolidated view had to be rebuilt outside the systems.

The challenge

To put a shared SAP foundation in place across the group while respecting what genuinely belongs to each subsidiary’s trade. The stake was not only technical: it meant deciding what had to be harmonised, what could stay local, and carrying that change with teams attached to practices that had served them — without interrupting production and distribution activities that tolerate no stoppage.

What AXENEO did

The work we carried out

01
Scoping and the group core model
- Process mapping subsidiary by subsidiary, bringing the real gaps into view
- Definition of a shared core model and of the local variants that could be accepted
- Assessment of each request for a custom development: business need, standard alternative, cost of maintenance
- Requirements repository and acceptance criteria by functional domain
02
Deployment in waves
- Sequencing of the subsidiaries and preparation of the switchover milestones
- Data migration workstream: perimeter, transformation rules, test sets
- Consistency checks and reconciliation before each go-live
- Learning carried from one wave to the next: the model settles as it rolls out
03
Change management and go-live
- Identification of the business champions in each subsidiary, and animation of that community
- User training and documentation of the target operating procedures
- Business acceptance testing organised by process, then non-regression campaigns
- Support at go-live, defects handled through to closure

Results

What the set-up changed

Results are described qualitatively. We do not publish figures we would not be able to document.

A core model shared across the subsidiaries, distinguishing explicitly what is harmonised from what stays local.
Item and supplier reference data cleaned up, with shared management rules.
A wave-based deployment trajectory, reusable for the subsidiaries that follow.
Users trained and equipped, with business champions identified in each subsidiary.
A consolidated view produced directly from the system.