Blue Diamond Embraces the SAP Ecosystem

How does a company acquire all the software it needs to run a digitized global supply chain with end-to-end control? One piece at a time.| Blue Diamond Growers, a cooperative of almond producers based in California’s Central Valley, operates two main business lines: selling branded snack nuts, almond milk, and global ingredients, and supplying almonds to other consumer packaged goods companies. When Blue Diamond's chief information officer, Steve Birgfeld, joined in 2016, the company was already two years into acquiring software from SAP. This marked the beginning of an extensive engagement with SAP, encompassing the purchase of multiple applications as part of Blue Diamond’s “digital supply chain journey.” Shortly after Birgfeld’s arrival, Blue Diamond implemented SAP's integrated business planning suite. Prior to this, the company engaged in a manual process that took up to six hours a day to develop multiple “what-if” demand scenarios. This exercise takes between 10 and 12 minutes, allowing Blue Diamond to quickly shift products between customers in response to sudden supply or delivery constraints. With the onset of COVID-19 and its accompanying supply chain disruptions, Blue Diamond needed to shift from monthly demand planning to weekly and even daily cadences, Birgfeld says. “COVID taught us that real-time planning was not a luxury item—i it’s a necessity,” says David Vallejo, SAP’s global head of digital supply chain. “You need to pivot on your heels.”After implementing integrated business planning, Blue Diamond added supplier collaboration software from SAP’s Ariba unit, which streamlined and automated invoice management and vendor onboarding. In 2021, Blue Diamond migrated to SAP S4/HANA, the latest iteration of SAP’s cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) suite, and adopted SAP