Explore Nestlé’s journey with SAP
With sales of more than one billion products a day, Nestlé S.A. is one of the world’s largest food and beverage companies. And with over 2,000 brands in 188 countries, the company’s operations are as large as they are complex. Nestlé’s journey with SAP began 20 years ago when it standardized its global ERP systems. Today, cloud solutions from SAP help support the digitization of everything from advanced analytics, customer experience, sustainability tracking to workforce and talent management.
275,000
Employees worldwide have a single point-of-entry to all SAP applications.
99.97%
Increased system availability with a simplified global IT infrastructure.
1,200
+
Terabytes of data moved to the cloud.
The Challenge
Strengthen the core: Building an IT infrastructure fit for global scale and complexity
To stay in the hearts and minds of consumers for 156 years as Nestlé has, you need to embrace change. But when your company sells more than a billion products each day and employs more than 275,000 people who manage over 2,000 brands in 188 countries, that’s easier said than done.
Nestlé’s business models and routes to market are changing as constantly as the world around us. Consumer expectations have shifted, and digital commerce is accelerating quickly. Supporting a future ready workforce with great employee experiences and efficiency at scale.
Nestlé knew that at the core of every successful company is a solid IT infrastructure built to utilize data and provide the business insights that guide decision-making. And so it began its digital transformation journey.
The Solution
Transforming with a seamless journey to the cloud
To ensure a smooth, disruption-free transition to a more dynamic, reliable, and scalable infrastructure, Nestlé selected the RISE with SAP solution—a complete offering of ERP software, industry practices and outcome-driven services designed to help companies take advantage of cloud computing in their mission-critical, core systems. With its global cloud transformation, Nestlé is now able to automate business processes across its operations, create innovative business models at global scale and achieve greater agility and resilience.
All of Nestlé’s cloud solutions are integrated and feed into its analytics tools allowing 275,000 employees worldwide to have a single point-of-entry to all SAP applications. This is a major game-changer, reducing the time and effort to manage IT systems.
With help from SAP Services and Support, including SAP MaxAttention services and the SAP Solution Delivery Center group, Nestlé shut down nine data centers and more than 10,000 servers. This enabled the company to migrate thousands of applications, 300 instances of SAP software, and a total of 1,200 terabytes of data to the cloud. Despite the size and complexity of the project, it was delivered on time, on budget, and without disruption to the business.
“What we have between the Nestlé IT teams and the SAP Services and Support team is a true partnership that delivered on an ambitious transformation program—one that’s critical to Nestlé’s future success in the marketplace,” Chris Wright, CIO.
Optimizing recruitment to retirement processes
One of the first areas of Nestlé’s digital transformation was the transformation of HR systems. The company used SAP SuccessFactors to standardize and automate HR processes that support everything from recruitment to retirement. Nestlé also uses SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP) to develop custom extensions of SAP SuccessFactors for situations such as high-volume hiring during seasonal surges.
By creating a hiring application that allows for batch handling and validation of employment data, Nestlé sped up the hiring process and made it much less cumbersome. Additionally, Nestlé now has a chatbot that speaks over 20 languages and answers simple and common questions from thousands of candidates each week without input (interactions) from HR professionals, providing a more seamless experience to the candidates and allowing the Nestlé team to focus on other work.
Giancarlo Pala
Head of IT HR / Nestlé S.A.
Transforming Customer Experience with One-Stop Shop
Nestlé is enhancing the customer experience for its business customers by streamlining the ordering, tracking, and invoicing processes. The existing approach relied on frequent telephone contact, resulting in time-consuming processes and potential errors. To overcome these challenges and adapt to the "Consumerization of Commerce," Nestlé implemented a global platform based on SAP Commerce Cloud. This platform eliminates the need for telephone contact by providing real-time insights into orders, invoices, and delivery information.
By offering a digital self-service portal, Nestlé improves the ordering and payment process, making it easier, quicker, and more efficient for retailers, wholesalers, supermarkets, and distributors. The unified one-stop shop built on SAP Commerce Cloud has revolutionized the previous customer service approach, reducing waiting times, enhancing flexibility, and ensuring transparency. This transition aligns with Nestlé's recognition of the importance of offering a seamless digital customer experience to stay competitive and meet evolving consumer expectations. The implementation of the platform not only benefits customers but also optimizes internal processes, increases flexibility, and supports Nestlé's sustainability efforts through paperless invoicing and better insights into orders, deliveries, and transportation.
Pablo Nill
Sr. Product Group Manager Customer Service Information Technology / Nestlé S.A.
The Result
Better IT infrastructure means better business efficiency and agility
Nestlé has seen a range of benefits from its implementation of RISE with SAP, which has enabled a rapid and cost-effective cloud transformation, reducing costs, and improving the security and compliance of its applications. In simplifying its global IT infrastructure, the company has increased systems availability to 99.97% with outage times reduced from six hours to seven minutes. With SAP BTP, the company can now deploy digital assets 10 times faster than before, increasing business agility and reducing time spent managing IT.
Business units such as human resources have seen improvements in their operations, too. Not only do they benefit from innovative applications like the multilingual chatbot, but increased automation has helped streamline and automate processes. Nestlé has also standardized the annual bonus and salary review processes across the company. Instead of taking a different approach in each country, 15,000 managers in more than 100 countries now use one common solution that has automated 95% of review processes.
The transition to a customer-oriented approach and improved customer experience has yielded significant benefits. The reliance on the internal ERP system has diminished with the implementation of SAP Commerce Cloud, enabling easier connections and freeing the company from IT system constraints. This enhanced flexibility has led to smoother processes and better visibility of ongoing activities. Customers can now manage orders and inquiries independently, allowing the customer service team to focus on more complex customer questions or provide additional support to the sales force teams.
Nestlé has strong commitments when it comes to sustainability and is using the information architecture of SAP to understand how its processes, supply chain, and manufacturing practices can be optimized to achieve these.
Future Plans
Improving the consumer experience
With Nestlé’s direct-to-consumer business increasing by more than 14% in the last year, the company is piloting SAP Commerce Cloud-based applications and portals to ensure that the customer has the same shopping experience buying directly from Nestlé as they do from a retailer.
Nestlé plans to continue its journey to migrate its entire business operations to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, with finance and procurement already live.
Nestlé’s digital transformation with SAP is helping to achieve their mission to unlock the power of food to enhance quality of life for everyone. And with SAP cloud solutions at the core, there is nothing stopping the company from fulfilling its purpose to be a force for good.
SAP helps Nestlé S.A. run better
Key business outcomes and benefits
- Reduced time spent on IT, allowing the company to quickly adjust business models and enter new markets
- Increased reliability, resilience, and performance of the platform
- Enhanced visibility and transparency
- 70% of hiring tasks now automated, improving data quality and cutting processing time by up to 90% in some markets
Featured solutions and services
- RISE with SAP can transition your current ERP data and processes to the cloud with less risk and without compromise. The bundle of tailor-made ERP software, transformation services, business analytics, and partner expertise guides you along a personalized path to the cloud.
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition is a ready-to-run cloud ERP that delivers the latest industry best practices and continuous innovation.
- SAP Business Technology Platform is a unified, business-centric platform that helps companies decide confidently, act with integrity, connect processes, data, and experiences, and achieve continued business innovation
- SAP SuccessFactors HCM Suite offers individualized experiences and strategic solutions – with mobile self-services available anytime, anywhere that empower employees to reach their full potential.
- SAP MaxAttention can help you realize the full potential of your intelligent enterprise vision with on-site, premium access to trusted SAP experts, tools, and methodologies that can help deliver your expected outcomes successfully with SAP solutions.
- SAP Commerce Cloud solution provides a trusted e-commerce platform to help you innovate at scale and tap enterprise-wide data to boost profits and customer satisfaction.
About Nestlé S.A.
Nestlé S.A. is a Swiss multinational food and drink processing conglomerate corporation. It is the largest publicly held food company in the world, measured by revenue and other metrics, since 2014.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Consumer Products | EMEA | 275,000 |
About Nestlé S.A.
Nestlé S.A. is a Swiss multinational food and drink processing conglomerate corporation. It is the largest publicly held food company in the world, measured by revenue and other metrics, since 2014.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Consumer Products | EMEA | 275,000 |