Digital transformation in a nutshell

Call for change

A smarter solution for growth

Blue Diamond Growers is the world’s largest almond supplier and processing company. The co-operative represents more than 3,000 California almond growers, helping them realize the best return on investments while delivering a quality product. It achieves this by innovating to open new markets—a mission that saw it shift from purely supplying raw materials for integration into other products, to packaging products directly for the consumer market. Blue Diamond Growers’ supply chain became incredibly complex as a result, with disjointed spreadsheet systems that made it a challenge to forecast supply and demand. The company realized its growth depended on a smarter, customer-focused supply chain management solution and set about creating one with Accenture.

When tech meets human ingenuity

Pivoting in a pandemic

Accenture collaborated with Blue Diamond Growers to design, build and launch a globally scalable, customer-centric, flexible supply chain planning solution based on SAP® Integrated Business Planning (IBP). Accenture’s virtual training ensured the entire Blue Diamond Growers team was proficient in the solution well ahead of launch. The solution, integrated with the on-premises SAP system, enabled real-time consolidation, validation and analysis of supply chain data, providing greater transparency for planning purposes.

When the pandemic struck, the company switched to a daily planning cycle with a joint SAP IBP and Accenture solution, Supply Chain Scenario Planning-as-a-Service. Simulation scenarios harnessed Accenture templates to quickly extract data and help in the reallocation of Blue Diamond Growers’ nut supply to satisfy shifting demands.

A valuable difference

Forecasting to future-proof

Blue Diamond Growers has transitioned from a disjointed, multi-system spreadsheet supply chain approach to a fully integrated, cloud-based solution that provides a single source of truth for demand and supply planning.

A single dashboard view helped improve forecast accuracy by 10% within the first six months of launch, enabling teams to optimize inventory. Teams spend less time manually sifting through data and can focus on higher value strategic activities. Supply Chain Scenario Planning-as-a-Service helped the company switch to a daily planning cycle to meet increased demand and manage warehouse capacity when local lockdowns hit. SAP S/4HANA® in the cloud is also now live, enhancing Blue Diamond Growers’ analytics and predictive capabilities. Accenture is supporting further projects, including the use of artificial intelligence to predict harvests.