About Foodstuffs South Island

Foodstuffs South Island Co-operative was formed 95 years ago and is today one of the leading grocery retailers on New Zealand’s South Island. The Co-operative supports well-known brands such as: New World, PAK’nSAVE, Four Square, Raeward Fresh, and On The Spot. Foodstuffs is 100% New Zealand owned and operated. Every day, the Co-operative works to be South Island’s most loved & trusted retailer, positively impacting its customers’ lives every day.

Digital Strategy

In 2018 Foodstuffs South Island created a Digital strategy (Beyond 2025) to transform SAP. Foodstuffs is undergoing a major SAP modernization roadmap including moving their central SAP ECC system to S/4HANA and re-platforming to SAP RISE (Project Petra). Other elements of Project Petra and the wider roadmap include SAP CAR, BTP Process Integration and Datasphere and the Supply Chain eWM, TM, LBN and warehouse insights.

SAP ECC to S/4HANA on SAP RISE

Starting with a business case in 2018, Blueprint signoff in February 2023, Foodstuffs South Island went successfully live on SAP RISE in March 2024.

S/4 Rise Project Timeline

Before the successful go-live, Foodstuffs South Island executed extensive testing with 3 dress rehearsals, 18 business areas, 68 testers executing 11,427 test cases.

The Need for Custom Code Automation

To fulfill industry-specific, regulatory and regional requirements, Foodstuffs South Island, as many other SAP customers, has extended the SAP ECC system systematically since 2007. Therefore, Foodstuffs South Island identified custom code transformation as a critical path item on their way to S/4HANA on SAP RISE and engaged with smartShift, to assess the scope of the challenge.

smartShift executed its Rapid Code Analysis for Foodstuffs’ SAP ECC system and identified 48,327 custom objects holding 1,9M lines of custom code in the system. smartShift also identified a huge potential to decommission of unused code from the system. The change impact to achieve compatibility with the new HANA database and the new S/4HANA digital core with 47,186 issues in the code was huge, as well as the technical debt related to performance, security, stability, ABAP(Cloud) standards accumulated over the years (202,023 issues). smartShift also identified a very active development going on in the ECC system with more than 2,800 new object developed per year.

Before engaging with smartShift, Foodstuffs South Island had estimated >1,000 person days of manual effort for only basic code remediation with its internal team with a 6-months duration. Foodstuffs South Island wanted to relief their internal team from mundane manual coding and focus them on more value-adding work. They also wanted to de-risk and accelerate the path to S/4HANA, address technical debt and minimize the business impact through minimizing code freeze during the program. Therefore, end of 2022 Foodstuffs South Island selected smartShift to own the custom code remediation and modernization including multi-month dual maintenance.

S/4HANA Timeline – Custom Code View

After the project kick-off end of 2022, extensive analysis and multiple workshops, smartShift performed full custom code remediation for two Sandbox systems and the new S/4HANA development system. smartShift also decommissioned unused custom code from the system and executed seven automated dual maintenance runs to synchronize the business-as-usual ECC changes with the newly built S/4HANA system. Everything was embedded into smartShift’s delivery methodology including project management, quality assurance, test support, issue resolution and go-live support.

Custom Code Automation Benefits

Utilizing smartShift Intelligent Automation, some impressive benefits for Foodstuffs South Island journey to S/4HANA on SAP RISE have been achieved.

Project timelines were massively accelerated with 5 weeks transformation duration for custom code per system. The industry scale quality of the automated custom code transformation with only 4 issues in testing minimized test regressions for Foodstuffs significantly compared to a manual approach. Automated dual maintenance helped to minimize the system freeze to a minimum and enabled Foodstuffs IT department to stay responsive event to bigger business initiatives throughout the S/4HANA transformation. Finally, Foodstuffs development team was able to invest 500 days into innovation projects, as they were freed up from mundane manual code fixing.

Gordon McCoy stated after the project: “Foodstuffs South Island would turn to smartShift again! The benefits directly contributed to the success of our transformation project and enabled our team to focus on innovation instead of correcting historical issues!”