22 Jan 2024

How Baker & Baker found a winning recipe for SAP (Guest blog from NTT Data)

Author: Robert Bailey, Senior Service Delivery Manager at NTT DATA Cloud Services Division

Look more closely next time you’re browsing the bakery shelves in a European supermarket, and you’ll be surprised by how many of the products are made by Baker & Baker, a leader in the European bakery convenience segment.

“Dedicated to delight” is the Baker & Baker motto. Formerly known as CSM Bakery Solutions, the business is headquartered in the northwest of England and operates 12 sites in seven countries, with about 2,500 employees and annual turnover exceeding GBP 400 million.

Baker & Baker owns several trusted and well-known bakery brands that offer a range of goods and services along with expert support.

Rising to the occasion

Following a divestment that left Baker & Baker operating as an independent organization, they needed to overhaul their business processes – and the supporting hardware, IT systems, shared services and manufacturing operations – to ensure continuity.

SAP was a critical part of most of these processes, including manufacturing, sales, order and supply management, transportation logistics and HR management.

However, a SAP environment can be complex to support and keep up to date. Downtime is often required, and there are many dependencies to consider. Falling behind with updates may not immediately harm the business directly but will leave it vulnerable to security threats, for example.

So, Baker & Baker needed a global managed service partner with SAP experience to help them plan and minimise the number of interruptions in their round-the-clock business operations.

This is where NTT DATA’s SAP experience sealed the deal, along with our cost-efficient approach to the project.

Teamwork seals the deal

During Baker & Baker’s initial engagement with NTT DATA, they had to balance streamlining their own business in four key channels – food service, retail, bakery and wholesale – with the effects of the divestment, all of which added to the complexity of the task.

Our experience with complex SAP environments quickly led to cost-effective, secure and compliant solutions with clear value propositions.

We migrated Baker & Baker to their own SAP environment – hosted on a private cloud platform – to make their business processes more efficient and accurate. Despite the inherent complexities of the project, it was completed within the planned timeline and budget.

Importantly, Baker & Baker appreciated what they called a “feeling of genuineness” from our team. And I have to summarize the secret of our success in a word, it’s “teamwork”. We work closely with our clients’ IT teams to implement our solutions faster and more efficiently. To support Baker & Baker’s new business structure, this approach made it easier to identify areas that needed critical attention and match their SAP environment to their evolving needs.

As Danny McCarthy, IT Director at Baker & Baker, says: “We needed to get the right people on board and the right processes in place, as well as the right documentation. We got this right by spending a lot of time together with the NTT DATA team.”

The power of collaboration

As we started working with Baker & Baker, I spoke to a representative of NTT DATA Business Solutions (NDBS), a SAP Platinum Partner that has resold SAP software and technology for more than three decades.

SAP UK and NDBS collaborated with Baker & Baker to create a pragmatic roadmap that allowed Baker & Baker, a long-time SAP customer, to adopt capability from SAP’s cloud portfolio at a pace that makes sense to them. This will culminate in a move to S/4HANA Cloud at the right time for the organization.

Next, Baker & Baker joined me at NTT DATA’s Transformation NOW! in London, the largest partner-led SAP conference in the UK. This engagement culminated in a new SAP proposal for Baker & Baker, which was worth the price of admission to the conference alone.

Not only had we wielded the power of the global NTT DATA network, but we had also built bridges with the SAP UK team, demonstrating the opportunities that flow from close collaboration.

Innovative SAP management

Now, Baker & Baker can focus on their core business activities as the ongoing monitoring and management of their SAP environment is in capable hands.

“The NTT team were amazing to work with,” says McCarthy. “They understood the scale of our project and were able to build separate systems that matched seamlessly while ensuring data integrity and segregation of duties.”

The innovation doesn’t stop here, either: not only does Baker & Baker now have access to other products and services from a trusted managed service provider like NTT DATA, but we’re also exploring how we can apply what we’ve accomplished here to help other organizations across industries.

Read NTT DATA’s full Baker & Baker case study or contact us to see how we can prepare your organization for the opportunities of tomorrow.

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