Maple Leaf Foods case study

Maple Leaf Foods Inc. is a producer of food products under several brands including Maple Leaf, and is a leading protein provider to many national restaurants and chains. It employs approximately 12,500 people across Canada, the US and Asia. The company is headquartered in Ontario, Canada.

Introduction

Maple Leaf Foods were faced with a number of challenges moving from their SAP ECC system to SAP S/4HANA. Learn how Proceed helped rightsize their data allowing for the successful removal of approximately 4.5TB of data, which ensured a much more efficient transition to the new system.

Background

As existing users of SAP ECC (SAP’s ERP Central Component), the business was keen to make the move and upgrade to S4/HANA to gain all the benefits the new platform offered. However, this move prompted a change in its archive set up – as well as reconsidering eliminating the ‘black box’ that was Centera, a physical hardware with limitations for destruction of data, and was well past its retention point.

It also needed to consider eliminating the PBS archiving software installed, to move towards a simplified solution, that allowed it to use standard SAP transactions to access archive data. Finding a supplier that had the expertise, and skill to achieve this efficiently and cost effectively was paramount. As well as providing an ongoing service that allowed it to outsource this key element of its infrastructure.

Achieving its archiving goal

The archiving project commenced in 2019 when Proceed Group began working closely with Maple Leaf’s Information Senior Leadership Team. Creating a team of Proceed consultants to work closely with the business was the first step, and moving forward with supporting the archiving of data for the ECC and satellite systems a key goal.

As part of Proceeds’ Archiving Service programme, Maple Leaf enjoys a dedicated helpdesk for all archiving issues, a regular health check, day-to-day archiving management, reporting and growth management. As part of the service implementation, Proceed were tasked with ‘right sizing’ the existing SAP ECC system, in readiness to move to S/4 HANA, which meant widening the scope of the existing archiving project to aggressively reduce the amount of data that required migrating – ensuring that only required data was migrated to the new system. This rightsizing project meant that Maple Leaf Foods successfully removed approximately 4.5TB of data, which ensured a much more efficient transition to the new system.

Once the rightsizing project was completed, Proceed worked to implement SAP’s Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) with SAP IQ, and migrated all Maple Leaf Foods archived data from a legacy content management solution into either OpenText or SAP/IQ. After completion, Maple Leaf Foods successfully migrated to S4/HANA at the end of 2020.

Knowledge transfer from skilled consultants critical to success

Maple Leaf Foods found the dedicated team of Proceed Consultants invaluable when it reached several difficult aspects of the archiving project, including SAP ILM configuration, SAP IQ database set up and several issue resolutions.

What the future looks like

Proceeds’ team continues to offer a day-to-day archiving service for Maple Leaf Foods, providing the business with an opportunity to drive significant cost savings whilst also reducing business risk. Typically Proceed achieves data savings from 33-90%, with up to £1m per year hyper-scaler infrastructure cost savings. Maple Leaf Foods can expect to achieve ongoing savings and efficiencies from its archiving programme with Proceed, whilst also being able to constantly optimise its current system with a constant review of pro-active improvements for archiving.