Standardize To Accelerate: Inside Nestlé’s Near‑Zero Downtime SAP Cutover

No downtime, no drama, and no disruption – lessons for midmarket IT leaders.

Fifty thousand employees. One hundred and twelve countries. Nineteen hours of downtime.

When your IT remit spans network, cloud and the SAP landscape underpinning a global giant, there’s no such thing as a low-risk change — which is exactly the context in which Nestlé undertook its recent rapid, large-scale upgrade to S/4HANA.

As well as being the world’s largest publicly held food company, Nestlé is also a founding member of SAP Rise, the German software giant’s ERP transformation programme.

“We were, as [SAP President of Enterprise Cloud Services] Peter Pluim said, the first ‘mega’ company to move into Rise when Rise really didn't exist,” says Nestlé’s head of IT platforms, Ralf Huebenthal.

The close relationship between the two companies continues to this day, with Nestlé recently completing the first of a three-step process to upgrade its global digital core. Eventually, this will be the world's largest-ever SAP upgrade to S/4HANA Cloud Private edition.

Practice Makes Perfect

Those three steps involve going region-by-region across the world, starting with Asia-Oceania-Africa (AOA) in 2025, before handling Europe this year and the Americas (AMS) in 2027.

The team certainly didn’t start at a small scale: the AOA region is “roughly two-thirds of the world,” and they managed the upgrade in less than 20 hours.

With the AOA region affecting 112 countries, as well as 50,000 people across Nestlé, getting it right first time was essential.

“Business downtime was 19 and a half hours,” says Ralf. “We [also] had some business uptime, which was 13 days altogether... We worked with SAP to improve [downtime] from previous upgrades we had done; and then it was a lot of practice, practice, practice.

“We started off with 48 hours when we did it for the first time, and then we really optimized and drove it down to where we ended up.”

That optimisation took many forms, from testing in a sandbox environment to paper-based processes and stand-ups. Ralf says the preparation “was one of the key parts of the success story.”

The other factor that helped limit downtime was Nestlé’s single shared global template for businesses processes: one of the reasons the company opted for a Brownfield upgrade, rather than Green- or Bluefield.

“If we had done a Greenfield [upgrade] we would have brought so much disruption to the business and to the end user community, because you have to retrain on every new process and every single new transaction. With the Brownfield upgrade the biggest amount of training was ‘The screen is not blue anymore, it's now brown’.”

Change, Managed

Although the immediate impact appeared small to the end user, with 50,000 people working with the systems daily some change management was necessary. Most retraining was handled through WalkMe - Nestlé is the company’s biggest customer, Ralf says – with the “more advanced” training limited to “two or three locations in our shared service centres.”

Part of that training was in how to use SAP’s own AI copilot, Joule. Nestlé is already running several proof-of-concepts, especially in the finance and supply chain communities, and intends to “embed it in everyday work.”

“Today we have over 100,000 users already using AI every day, either through Copilot or something we call NestGPT. The mission for us is to embed it in everyday work. We don't want to make it a big separate thing. It is part of how you do work, so that's how we drive it - that's why we already have such big adoption.”

Putting Joule in the same interface people are already using was key to ensuring the transition buttery-smooth and AI adoption was high:

“Yes, there will be expert users who will use Joule direct, but the majority should interact through Copilot, which is our chosen platform for users to interact with their business processes and with their day-to-day jobs.”

Going Global

Nestlé started its transformation with scale in the AOA region, but Europe and North America have their own challenges. Europe, on the calendar for May, has “different complexities” - for example, the need to use Taxmarc, as well as complying with a range of stringently enforced rules and regulations.

Despite that, the company intends to meet or beat the 19.5-hour downtime it had with last year’s transformation, which would be a new record: the last time it upgraded its European system, the downtime lasted 24 hours.

And while the North and South America region may not be at the same geographic scale as AOA, it’s still Nestlé’s largest system: a 48-terabyte scale-out environment, twice the size of Europe or AOA.

That brings its own challenges, but Ralf’s team is already preparing – following the theme of “practice, practice, practice.”

“The continuous learning we have out of Europe will help us to achieve AMS, and it's all about business downtimes - that's crucial.

“We are super keen on getting it done; we want to stay in a leading position with our digital back end, which really is a huge business advantage towards our peers, because we can react and manage much faster.”

This article originally appeared on our sister site Computing.