Riverside Natural Foods: Building a Clean Core for Agility and Growth

Services: SAP Cloud ERP Implementation

Technologies: SAP Private Cloud, SAP Signavio

Industry: Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG)

The Challenge

Operating in the consumer products industry with a focus on healthier food alternatives, Riverside Natural Foods has always been driven by a purpose to prioritize people, the planet, and profit. However, as the company expanded, it faced the limitations of disconnected processes, inefficient manual workarounds, and restricted data visibility, all of which hindered scalability and operational agility.

The Solution

To address these challenges, Riverside migrated from its former on-premises ERP to SAP Cloud ERP Private with the support of Talan. Through this transformation, the company aimed to unify operations, establish a single source of truth for master data, and create a foundation for continued growth.

Leveraging Talan’s expertise, Riverside launched a Clean Core initiative to optimize its ERP landscape. This approach focused on three key pillars:

1. Enhancing user knowledge and skills, ensuring teams were equipped to adopt and sustain new processes.
2. Adhering to SAP standard best practices and processes, minimizing customizations to preserve system agility and scalability.
3. Prioritizing master data cleanliness and accuracy, improving data integrity across operations.

The Results

Over 15 months, Riverside worked alongside Talan to embed these principles. The result was $1.7 million in cost savings and cost avoidance, as well as productivity improvements equivalent to 42 full-time employees annually. The company also experienced significant enhancements in master data accuracy, reducing invoicing and sales errors while aligning shipment, order, and financial transactions for better business insights.

Riverside continues to leverage SAP Signavio to analyze and optimize processes, ensuring that operational agility and continuous improvement remain integral to its business strategy.

“SAP best practices helped us more effectively address not only our technology requirements, but those of our business processes as well.”