Compass Group Netherlands Saves Thousands of SAP Data Processing Hours

Introduction
Compass Group Netherlands is part of the Compass Group, a world leading food service company, serving 5.5 billion meals to people across 45 countries annually. With food as its core competency, Compass prides itself in its ability to provide clients with a wide range of innovative dining solutions and the highest quality service to its customers.

While catering companies aren’t typically known for being data-driven, Compass sets itself apart by leveraging data gathered from its SAP systems to anticipate customer demand. The company understood that modernizing SAP data processing was key to securing its differentiation in the market.

The Challenge
Ruud Jackel, Application Manager for Compass Group Netherlands, is responsible for maintaining the region’s SAP systems, which are core to operating back-end processes for the catering business. Initially, his team was using SAP ERP for Human Resources and Payroll, and they were using a different SAP system, that they shared with a team from another region, for Finance and Accounting purposes. The multi-system, cross-regional process created challenges with governance, and Ruud’s team knew they needed a streamlined process.

“Compass is a data-driven organization because we want to be able to know what our customers need in advance and have it ready for them,” said Ruud. “It was challenging to do this when we were operating on multiple systems because it created silos with the data. We needed a solution that would merge the two systems and then transition to the SAP for Retail industry solution.”

While Compass understood their greatest challenge was automating complex SAP processes, getting the system set up to automate data was a challenge in and of itself. Transitioning to an updated SAP solution would require the company to migrate data from the other region’s system to the new retail solution. The IT team did not want to use SAP’s built-in legacy system migration workbench (LSMW) solution to move the data. “We had used that tool to do mass transactions before, but it was cumbersome and error prone,” said Ruud.

Read this case study and learn more about how automation also helped dramatically reduce the occurrence of errors in Compass’s SAP processes.