Managed SAP services unlock value for CSM Ingredients

Vision

Consolidating a complex global IT landscape

CSM Ingredients was launched in April 2021 following the completion of a private equity agreement. The company manufactures ingredients, primarily for the confectionary and baking industry. They are a key supplier of ingredients used in the production of the final products companies sell to their consumers, and they only sell to other businesses.

When they split from their parent company, they inherited a complex IT landscape, using various SAP components. While the larger company had the necessary staff complement to manage this system, this was no longer the case for CSM Ingredients.

Outsourcing the management of their SAP environment to an external provider would enable their internal IT team to focus on their overall strategy for digital growth and business process transformation.

Transformation

Streamlining operations and enhancing efficiency through specialized skills

SAP is a powerful tool; leveraging it to unlock the benefits of actionable insights, process automation and managing sustainability takes specialized skills, such as knowing how to work with SAP’s SLAs. SAP is critical to CSM Ingredients’ manufacturing environment, logistics and consistent communication with customers – in other words, to their enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM).

The manufacturer uses SAP S/4HANA across their global operations. Having a partner who manages interactions with SAP relieves much of the burden of following up on tickets as well as optimizing the return of investment on SAP. This means the organization can widen its focus on strategy and leveraging the system to meet its overall goals instead of mainly actioning tickets.

Internally, this has caused an appetite to tackle additional projects, which has to be balanced with the mandate to stay in budget. Since investing in IT by using a partner to manage services was new, they had to be educated on how this investment would benefit them in the long run.

“You really have to educate them on change to say: here's the type of efficiency that you can have from adopting this process. Can you save by moving a person to another area? Can we spend more time in the analysis of the data?” explains Eduardo Silva, the CIO of CSM Ingredients.

We also manage a backup solution to create redundancy and improve safety.

Results

Managing SAP as part of a digitization journey

With a CSM Ingredients can take advantage of the business insights and automation capabilities of SAP and our expertise in managing SAP products and processes. This simplifies the company’s IT landscape and helps maximize their SAP return on investment.

Combining business knowledge and SAP knowledge

Having a partner that understands both CSM Ingredients’ business operations and SAP internal operations allows tickets to be resolved more quickly.

Complementing the SAP solution

Having a backup solution that ties in seamlessly with the SAP solution protects critical data and information stored in SAP. This information can be easily recovered in case of data loss or system failure. This helps to minimize downtime, which is something every manufacturer wants to avoid.