Barry Callebaut, February 2021
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Global enterprises rely on SAP to run their business operations. The German software behemoth or similar vendors offer anything from accounting, production planning, and supply chain management to HR and beyond. These big players are so deeply woven into the fabric of global enterprises that the saying has remained true for decades now:
No one ever got fired for buying SAP.
The functional coverage of such software suites is impeccable. However, choosing the save bet often creates unintended customization challenges besides the high implementation, running, and switching costs. The requirements of a global enterprise function, take HR, will never fully match the customization options available.
In this sense, SAP can be compared to a website builder like Squarespace or WordPress. These tools and their existing templates will get you to a new website quickly, but they come with trade-offs. You might not be able to design it exactly the way you want it to, extend it with your new idea, or create workarounds to make it work.
These workarounds add up and take up valuable time. They become habits, and before you know it, you’ve lost a significant amount of the efficiency gains you set out to achieve by implementing the save bet in the first place.
The comparison to website builders is not entirely fair, though. The cost of leveraging a website builder is significantly lower than building a custom website from scratch. This is not the case with SAP.
Barry Callebaut, one of the world’s leading chocolate manufacturers, experienced these challenges when extending the SAP suite with SuccessFactors for its HR function. As the workarounds added up, they sought a pragmatic solution that would match their needs by reducing manual input and increasing the level of automation.
Our partnership with Barry Callebaut has introduced us to the world of chocolate - figuratively and literally. We’ve had the sweet privilege to work with their HR, Operations, and Finance teams for many years. During this time, we’ve collected thousands of miles and spent hours on planes to meet with their teams from the US to Singapore and from the Ivory Coast to Belgium. At times, their headquarters in Zurich felt like our own office. Working with a partner for a long time creates valuable relationships and opportunities to push the status quo together.
We’ve launched their global job architecture, developed an internal career planning tool, and automated a capability assessment for global transformation projects. The deep understanding of Barry Callebaut’s culture, operations, and pain points gave us a head start to automate their compounded workarounds out of existence.