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 Transportation Management. The ERP suite now serves as Blue Diamond’s data warehouse. With SAP Transportation Management, the company initially focused on ocean freight, utilizing independent software vendor Project44 for shipment visibility. This allowed Blue Diamond to inform customers of any delays in product arrivals.

In 2023, Blue Diamond turned its attention to managing domestic freight, which faced fluctuating prices, making timely and cost-effective product delivery challenging.

The ultimate goal, Vallejo says, was to enable Blue Diamond to integrate financial planning with logistics—two areas that typically don’t share key information and planning scenarios in real time.
Implementing the various modules had its challenges. Connecting Ariba to SAP’s ERP Control Component (ECC) took time, and it was nearly five months before Blue Diamond’s planners fully trusted the data from Project 44 and the SAP logistics business network. “I personally thought they would embrace it faster because it added so much capability for them—it made their lives easier,” Birgfeld says. “They got a little scared.”

The results have been impressive. Birgfeld reports that Blue Diamond has seen more than $1 million in savings on transportation costs since activating the SAP modules. With improved visibility, insights, and the ability to plan on the fly, “our OTIF [on time, in full] saw upticks.” Customer service has also improved, with fewer inquiries about shipment status, as customers now access this information directly through the portal.

Birgfeld says Blue Diamond plans to further expand its reliance on the SAP ecosystem, including manufacturing modules such as plant maintenance and production planning and scheduling, and leveraging the vendor’s AI capabilities. “It’s another step in their roadmap,” Vallejo says. “They’re really taking our word.”