Case Study | Blue Diamond Growers

Continuous SAP Modernization Driving 25% Cost Savings

customer-quote

Our SAP infrastructure is critical to our manufacturing facilities and our supply chain. We chose Protera due to their high technical proficiency, proactive managed services, and breadth of cloud expertise for future growth.

- Ryan Funk, IT Director

customer-quote (1)
 
3

Month Migration to SAP Cloud ERP Private

38

Systems Migrated to Google Cloud

25
%

TCO Savings

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Blue Diamond Growers, a farmer-owned cooperative representing approximately 3,000 of California’s almond growers, is the world's leading almond marketer and processor. Established in 1910, it created the California almond industry and opened world markets for almonds. Blue Diamond is dedicated to delivering the benefits of almonds around the world and does so by providing high-quality almonds, almond ingredients and branded products. Headquartered in Sacramento, the company employs more than 1,800 people throughout its processing plants, receiving stations and gift shops. 

Business Challenges

Blue Diamond Growers, a leading agricultural cooperative, faced stability and service challenges due to the impending closure of their private cloud provider. Running SAP S/4HANA in a private cloud environment on Google Cloud, the situation was compounded by fluctuating monthly cloud costs with lack of transparency from their provider. Ryan Funk, the IT Director of Blue Diamond Growers, sought a provider with expertise in migrating and integrating enterprise workloads across multiple sites, and selected Protera for a comprehensive solution that could grow with the business.

“The lack of visibility and inconsistent cloud costs made budget management difficult and unpredictable,” said Ryan Funk, Director of IT for Blue Diamond Growers. “Our SAP infrastructure is critical to our manufacturing facilities and our supply chain. We chose Protera due to their technical proficiency, proactive managed services, and breadth of cloud expertise for future growth.

Business Solution

Protera provided a tailored solution that involved migrating Blue Diamond Growers' mission critical SAP workloads to Google Cloud, addressing needs for stability, support, and cost efficiency. By moving 38 SAP and SAP S/4HANA servers to the robust infrastructure of Google Cloud, the Blue Diamond Growers team immediately benefited from a more stable and reliable cloud environment.

Protera’s expertise accelerated the migration process, ensuring a seamless transition with minimal disruption to the business. The migration also brought cost savings and introduced much-needed transparency to their monthly cloud expenses. Additionally, Protera offered ongoing support and integration services, laying the groundwork for future integration of SAP and SaaS applications across various sites and clouds.

“We originally had a five-month window to migrate our workloads to the public Google Cloud environment,” said Funk. “However, our previous provider was losing employees and we had to quickly pivot and migrate in eight weeks. Protera achieved that deadline, was on budget, and the entire process was smooth.” Funk also noted that on Monday morning after go-live, of the 2,000 end users, no one noticed any difference in logging in.

Business Outcomes

The transition to Google Cloud yielded an immediate 25% reduction in cloud spend, translating to well over six figures in savings annually. The business experienced enhanced stability and support, along with integration of SAP and surrounding workloads in a hybrid environment, greatly improving their operational efficiency. The team smoothly upgraded SAP S/4HANA to version 2023 on Google Cloud.

Blue Diamond Growers leveraged the networking expertise of Protera to integrate SAP S/4HANA on Google Cloud with on premise and SaaS applications across multiple sites. The team relies on Protera Watchdog, a monitoring and alerting tool part of Protera CloudVantage – Protera’s proprietary cloud management and automation platform. With Protera Watchdog, Funk and his team are alerted of any anomaly in their system, as Watchdog proactively monitors SAP systems and automates SAP Basis monitoring. “We use Protera Watchdog for automated stopping and starting, automated patches, and to identify immediate tasks my team needs to perform on our SAP systems in the cloud,” says Funk. “Protera Watchdog provides us with a peace of mind, that our mission critical workloads are monitored, supported, and secure.”

By partnering with Protera, Blue Diamond Growers has successfully navigated the complexities of cloud migration and integration. The business achieved significant cost savings and improved operational stability as well as positioned itself for future growth and technological advancement.

As the world’s largest almond marketer and processor, Blue Diamond Growers relies on robust and reliable IT services to maintain operations, as well as a competitive edge. Funk and his IT team of 13 are now focused on projects up the stack, such as agricultural sustainability initiatives, line of business applications, and delving deeper into cloud native strategies and tooling. “We saw improvements immediately with Protera in three core areas: stability, partnership with expertise, and cost savings,” said Funk. “We are a small team and continue to leverage the deep bench of experts and breadth of SAP and cloud services at Protera.”

Continuous SAP Modernization 

Blue Diamond’s strategic roadmap included transitioning to SAP’s SaaS model, with a staged progression to SAP Cloud ERP Private (RISE with SAP) to minimize impact and maximize immediate value to the business.

The Protera, SAP, and Google Cloud teams collaborated to develop a migration to RISE for key SAP landscapes, with an aggressive migration timeline to accommodate BlueDiamond’s corporate schedule. The project successfully executed within 3 months, with Protera providing project management, BASIS consulting, and migration services.

The project streamlined Blue Diamond’s SAP licensing and maintenance fees and served as a key milestone on the path to SAP modernization.  Cloud ERP Private with SAP’s native features ensure that Blue Diamond has the most current updates and access to innovations such as AI, machine learning, and advanced analytics.

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