Colombina: Cultivating harmonized processes with the help of cloud ERP
Sweetening the customer offering with cloud ERP
Global food company Colombina SA, best known for its sweet treats, wanted to standardize its processes in key areas, such as finance and the supply chain, to grow sales and manage costs. Colombina chose the RISE with SAP journey for its migration to an SAP Cloud ERP Private solution, that it might adopt capabilities in areas including e-commerce, predictive analytics, and demand planning.
| Industry | Region | Company Size | Partner |
| Consumer products | Cali, Colombia | 3,000 employees | Kyndryl Inc. |
increase in users of SAP Fiori apps, from 38 to 78.
improvement in average customer response times.
improvement in workload distribution.
Chief Information Officer, Colombina SA
| Industry | Region | Company Size | Partner |
| Consumer products | Cali, Colombia | 3,000 employees | Kyndryl Inc. |
increase in users of SAP Fiori apps, from 38 to 78.
improvement in average customer response times.
improvement in workload distribution.
Chief Information Officer, Colombina SA
Managing information and processes across multiple market segments
At almost 100 years old, Colombina is a global food company and leading confectioner in Colombia and Central America that seeks to captivate consumers through the innovation and flavor of its products. From its seven processing plants supplying 39 distribution centers, the business manufactures 16 food categories, including sweets, cookies, cakes, sauces, and preserves. Colombina has 75 own-brand point-of-sale outlets in Colombia and 3 in Guatemala, as well as operations in more than 80 countries that serve 750,000 customers worldwide.
Given its setup and widespread operations, the company had to constantly review and adopt specialized technology solutions in each market segment. It therefore wished to standardize its business processes and software while improving the integrity, availability, and confidentiality of its information.
IT Project Manager, Colombina SA
Combining existing solutions with cloud ERP to harmonize processes
Moving forward from on-premises ERP, Colombina migrated from SAP S/4HANA to an SAP Cloud ERP Private solution with a big-bang approach across 16 countries. The company uses the solution’s functionality for finance and asset management, specifically for cash management and maintenance management, respectively. In the area of manufacturing, the business hopes to streamline product planning, manufacturing operations and models, and quality management processes. It’s also focused on simplifying supply chain tasks, including inventory, warehousing, delivery and transportation, order promising, and logistics material identification. Colombina wants to improve order and contract management as part of sales.
To harmonize processes in several areas, the company integrated cloud ERP with its existing software systems. These included SAP Fiori apps; SAP Customer Experience, SAP SuccessFactors, SAP Integrated Business Planning, SAP Analytics Cloud, and SAP Ariba solutions; and the SAP Cloud for Customer mobile app and migration tool for Cloud Integration. Colombina can take advantage of these offerings working together extensively in SAP Business Suite.
Colombina sought assistance with the implementation from SAP Services and Support, availing itself of SAP Cloud Application Services and SAP Enterprise Support offerings as well as SAP Learning Hub. Kyndryl Inc. also helped with the six-month cloud deployment. Once Kyndryl delivered the solution, the postprocessing phase was completed six hours ahead of schedule, with regular progress updates from the SAP team. In migrating to the cloud solution, the integration configuration activities were promptly carried out, and the technical team supported Colombina to quickly escalate and resolve tickets and service requests.
Enhancing efficiency in operations and decision-making
Implementing an SAP Cloud ERP Private solution and integrating it with the existing IT landscape has benefited Colombina’s 3,000 employees in several areas. For example, it has helped strengthen sales, marketing, and e-commerce, enhancing the customer experience and contributing to a decrease in customer returns. The solution also enables Colombina to improve the efficiency and capacity of customer demand planning and forecasting. The business can now manage its human resources more efficiently and effectively, aligning employee goals with the organization’s strategic objectives. It can optimize the purchasing and supplier management processes alongside its online inventory reservation. And having analytical information is aiding Colombina with strategic decision-making.
Specifically, the solution allows the company to offer customers next-day delivery after an order has been placed. It can also provide management information the day after month-end closing. The deployment has improved the company’s system performance and hardware capacity, doubled the number of users of its SAP Fiori apps, and boosted average customer response times by more than a third. (The average response time in the dialog task has decreased from 662 milliseconds to 409 milliseconds during peak hours.)
Furthermore, the business has been able to significantly improve workload distribution and reduce its CPU usage on application servers—now using eight application servers instead of three.
Featured partner
Kyndryl Inc. provides IT infrastructure services as part of its commitment to the health and continuous improvement of the vital systems at the heart of the digital economy. With its partners and thousands of customers worldwide, it cocreates solutions to help enterprises reach their peak digital performance.