Section 13.6. ESA in action: Arla Foods


13.6. ESA in action: Arla Foods

Arla Foods, like many companies, faced data challenges. One of its goals in adopting ESA was to create a global master data repository, a feat it has since achieved. Arla Foods is the largest dairy producer in Europe, generating more than 10 billion kilograms of fresh milk and nearly $8 billion in revenues each year. The company employs nearly 25,000 people worldwide, although most are located in its home markets of Sweden, Denmark, and the United Kingdom. Arla Foods is also one of the world's largest cooperative companies, composed of the 11,600 dairy farmers who are also its core suppliers. Cooperative members dominate Arla's board of directors and inform the company's strategic missionto sell members' milk and process it into dairy products, which can command premiums and maximize profits for the members. To achieve its current size, Arla Foods and its predecessors executed dozens of mergers and acquisitions, leading to a very complex IT environment.

In hopes of resolving this heterogeneity and creating a flexible framework for future acquisitions, Arla embarked on the "One Arla" project five years ago with the goal of integrating nearly 170 customer, employee, producer, and vendor systems and solutions around a single SAP platform (see Figure 13-4). Arla's early solution to this challengewhich has MDM and application integration aspectswas to use SAP NetWeaver Exchange Infrastructure (SAP NetWeaver XI) to create proto-enterprise services beginning in 2002.

Figure 13-4. Arla Foods' MDM system landscape


First, Arla created a single global master data repository filled with harmonized customer, supplier, and partner information. Then, using SAP NetWeaver XI, Arla created approximately 150 interfaces40 of which are designated "mission critical"to pass data from the repository and across a system landscape that includes Arla's own SAP R/3 implementation and customers' own systems. Whenever a customer's profile changes, for example, an XML message updates the record in the global master data, followed by a flurry of messages to any other applications currently using that profile, keeping every incarnation of that data in sync with the global master data.

By standardizing the data types contained within these interfaces as XML messages, Arla has already evolved into an enterprise-services-like environment, and currently has an IT application integration team building simple composite applications from the interfaces. One example is myWorkPlace, an employee portal built using the SAP NetWeaver Portal component that integrates Arla's email, invoicing, and other systems into a single UI.

Arla anticipates a full transition to ESA over the next few years when it upgrades from SAP R/3 to mySAP ERP and does the same with supporting systems. The evolution of the service gridin the form of standardized, commercially available enterprise serviceswill afford Arla the opportunity to replace the functionality of legacy applications with service-enabled functionality, increasing its flexibility for absorbing and reconciling new systems from acquisitions while lowering total cost of ownership (TCO). The overarching benefit of ESA for Arla will be the replacement of its homegrown, service-oriented environment with a universal, standardized, and less costly one that will still leverage its experience with the underlying IT.




Enterprise SOA. Designing IT for Business Innovation
Enterprise SOA: Designing IT for Business Innovation
ISBN: 0596102380
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 265

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