Enhancing Analytics at Darta as they move to SAP S/4HANA

Organization & context

Darta is a Belgian family company founded in 1988, specializing in developing, processing, and commercialising fresh frozen products. Their product range includes vegetables, fruits, herbs & ready-made dishes. Established with a vision to deliver fresh and nutritious food solutions, Darta has grown into a global leader in the frozen food industry employing more than 900 people and exporting products to more than 100 countries.

Sustainability is a key priority for Darta, and they strive to positively contribute to society. Their head office and main production site are located in Ardooie, West Flanders, a region known for its production of frozen vegetables.

The challenge

Darta is growing both organically and through acquisitions. Driven by the many acquisitions and the growing business, a new ERP was due to both optimize and automate business processes. In 2022, Darta decided to step-by-step integrate and rely on SAP ERP (S/4HANA Cloud).

The transition to SAP S/4HANA Cloud was planned to be phased across the various Darta entities & countries: spread over several years, each site would switch to SAP ERP while operations would naturally continue across the group. This meant that, without acting, all existing reports would become incomplete: all reporting had to be reworked.

Rather than only solving the problem at hand, Darta management wanted to take this moment as an opportunity and - in 2023 - immediately looked at what could be improved in analytics, what could be automated in terms of reporting & how the analytics and data ambitions of the future could be guaranteed. Darta wanted to define a clear and executable vision on how reporting & use of data can be improved in a future-proof way: how can Darta prepare for everything around Analytics & AI and specifically use the switch to SAP ERP now as momentum for acceleration?

Our project together

As element61 we proposed Darta management to start with an Analytics Roadmap to look together with them at what was going well in analytics, what could be improved, what ambitions there were, what concrete business cases there are now & how we can translate all this into a step-by-step plan with clear Data & ICT architecture.

During a 6-week roadmap exercise, the element61 & Darta data team worked together and jointly ran a series of interviews & workshops, resulting in a concrete and aligned vision on the priorities in reporting & analytics for Darta in the next years ahead. 

As part of the strategic approach, a true roadmap & timeline plan was built around phasing the work & deliverables. Given the priority was clearly to support the SAP S/4HANA live with continuity in reporting, the emphasis was on what can we realize within the timeline set of the phased migration. One element was clear: the setup of a new Data Platform was crucial to harmonize the data from existing ERPs & the future SAP S4 ERP as well as to be ready for everything around production OT data & AI.

Kickstarted around June 2023, a new Azure Data Platform was set up by element61 in co-development. The first waves of delivery focused on supporting initial reporting domains such as sales, purchasing, inventory & finance. In the development of these first domains, the integration of the current ERP – i.e., CS Solutions & ARCA – was first done to guarantee that, as such, a solid new data model was there to, next, integrate the new ERP system (i.e. SAP S/4HANA). We’ve worked together to develop these new data models into a true 'Enterprise Data Model,' enabling us to easily integrate all SAP data into this Data Model later on. This approach allowed us to maintain a single data model for each operational domain—such as Sales—independent of the data source. 

Both the new data model as well as the integration of the SAP S/4HANA ERP were accelerated through the Power BI "Out-of-the-Box" modules from element61. These modules are pre-built analytical solutions designed to expedite the implementation of business intelligence (BI) and reporting capabilities on different functional domains such as Finance, Sales, HR, Inventory, etc... In total, element61 has 10 such modules available and ready to deploy. They contain all you need to deliver from source to report including the extraction scripts, the transformations, the views & even the Power BI reports themselves.

The Power BI "Out-of-the-Box" modules allowed Darta to significantly reduce the time and effort required to cover new data sources (like SAP S/4HANA) with BI reporting in this project. 

For Darta, the fit-gap analysis showed that 74% of the reporting requirements within the Sales, Finance, Procurement and Inventory domains could be covered by leveraging Power BI “Out-of-the-Box”, allowing the project to accelerate on more than 70% of the scope and to focus on the remaining 30% of custom requirements. The Power BI "Out-of-the-Box" modules are available for a broad range of domains and ERPs, including SAP S/4HANA and Darta leveraged in this project the modules for both sales, finance, procurement and inventory. 

Read more about our Power BI "Out-of-the-Box"

Results & impact

Less than four months after the kickstart of the project, the first analytics dashboards and reports on the Sales domain were created and in wide validation within the organization. In the meantime, the reporting has become more interactive, faster, and more automated, gaining broad support across all layers of the organization.

In the spring of 2024, Darta went live with its first entities on SAP S/4HANA. Later during summer, the Inventory domain was released. Leveraging the project work done, all reporting before & after continued to run smoothly as the new data platform already harmonized historical and new data perfectly. This continuity allowed for crucial business insights during the first steps in the new ERP migration.

In the coming months, this element61 built Modern Data Platform will be expanded with more data on Finance and Procurement domains. Plans also include Production reporting and more countries will come live with SAP S/4HANA yet the platform has proven to support these intense moments. In addition, the platform is ready for innovations such as a first artificial intelligence use-case planned by the end of 2024 and the use of data to predict demand, detect anomalies, and optimize production.

"element61 has not only modernized our reporting environment but has also enabled a seamless transition to Analytics that are directly leveraged by all levels of our organization. Their approach is already paying off, with immediately noticeable improvements in actionable insights.  The smooth cooperation with their experts has only strengthened this success. We look forward to the future and to the further possibilities that the data will offer us in terms of management information and beyond."  - Jørgen Trauwaen - Group IT Director at d'Arta

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