JBS Foods Reduces Migration Risk to SAP S/4HANA with Selective, Tiered Approach

JBS Foods (“JBS”) successfully concludes the first phase in their multi-year SAP S/4HANA transformation initiative.

JBS ($70b+) is the largest protein producer in the world. They employ ~245,000 team members, operate over 400 production plants, and their products provide meals for customers across 190 countries. Core operations for their pork, chicken, and beef businesses run on a single global instance of SAP ECC 6.0.

As of February 20th 2023, JBS has successfully moved one-third of their US business to SAP S/4HANA. A very short downtime window at go-live was met, leveraging cbs’ Enterprise Transformer (ET), resulting in 60+ legal entities in North America now live on S/4HANA with minimal business disruption. Syskoplan Reply and cbs combined functional, business process, and technical experience to deliver a flexible selective data transition to SAP’s newest platform for JBS.

The new system is lean, with only two years of fully transformed transactional data history. JBS took this opportunity to adjust its financial structures leveraging a more streamlined global chart of accounts and new cost center and profit center hierarchies. JBS implemented over 50 key innovations, was able to shed large amounts of outdated and obsolete custom code, introduced over 120 FIORI apps, harmonized master data, and renewed analytics capabilities by replacing its legacy BW with BW/4HANA.

As a long-time SAP customer, JBS started to plan for SAP S/4HANA in 2019. The internal team quickly concluded that a greenfield implementation would have been too complex and disruptive to the business. A brownfield conversion was considered high-risk as a single-instance ECC system requires conversion as a whole in one single, global big bang. Selective Data Transition helped manage risk by breaking up the S/4HANA transformation into more manageable waves while allowing to reduce the overall data footprint and transforming financial structures. Additional waves are scheduled to continue through 2026.

If you want to learn more about how JBS is tackling their S/4HANA journey, schedule a call with us using the link below!