Clemens Food Group

In operation for over a century, Clemens Food manages procurement, production and logistics services from birth to finishing, supplying food service companies and retailers with a full range of pork products.

About the Project

Pork Processing Company Turns to SAP S/4HANA to Integrate Operations

Clemens Food Group does business in the wildly fluctuating markets of the perishable goods industry, so gaining precision in consideration of yields, costs and prices is vitally important.

Clemens Food wanted to retire its legacy ERP system in favor of a modern, integrated platform capable of scaling with the anticipated growth of the business.  Learn why they chose to implement SAP S/4HANA to replace their existing environment consisting of more than 70 disparate applications.

Going All In

With the new facility on the horizon as well as the anticipated growth, Rennells says that building a business case for a fully integrated platform was not hard to make. Rather, a modern platform was an absolute necessity — a key ingredient in crafting the five-year vision Clemens Food had for the business. “At that point, we went through a pretty extensive decision-making process,” he says. “We researched a lot of new technologies as far as their ability to meet our needs. One of our strategies is to use proven best technology for what works in our industry. Where there is market volatility and inherent risks in selling a perishable product, we have to be very precise on yields and costs, and a lot of those factors pointed us to SAP software.”

The Benefits of an Integrated System

Clemens Food brought its two production plants live on SAP S/4HANA in May 2017, without any business disruption, three months before production operations began at the new facility. So as not to disrupt production or shipping capabilities, the business built in a planned downtime for production to address any issues with shipping or procurement — functionality that is tied to the plant’s main distribution system. The planned downtime also ensured that any master data flaws potentially discovered through testing would be cleaned up and master data would be in place prior to go-live.

The integrated system has brought deeper insights and visibility. This translates to improved customer service; with available-to-promise processes running on SAP S/4HANA and with SAP S/4HANA integrated with its warehouse management system, Clemens Food can assure customers placing a phone order whether there is inventory available. In the pork industry, this can be more complicated than it seems when one considers that a single hog can be broken down into hundreds of by-products. Prior to SAP S/4HANA, Clemens Food was able to provide the same assurance only when an order was ready for shipment.