How Nestlé is putting the ingredients in place for embedded AI with three-stage S/4HANA upgrade

Long-term SAP user Nestlé has completed the first stage of a major project switching from ECC to SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition. The first part of a three-stage project, the current rollout covers 112 countries and more than 50,000 employees.

The food and beverage giant owns over 2,000 brands across the world, including Nescafé, Perrier, Carnation, and Christmas favorite Quality Street. It has been using SAP as a single unified system since 2000, and shifted to the cloud in 2022.

A big impetus for the switch to S/4HANA was the fast-approaching end of mainstream support for ECC, which runs out in 2027. Nestlé was also keen to take advantage of the single template to gain a single quality source of master data. Ralf Huebenthal, Global Head of IT Platforms at Nestlé, explains:

If we’d have stuck with ECC, we obviously would be missing out on ...