Case Study: Milcobel achieves real-time profitability insights with SAP HANA

Milcobel Empowers Finance with Profitability Insights

Milcobel, Belgium’s largest dairy cooperative that processes 1.8 billion liters of milk from 2,400 farms, faced fragmented IT across six factories: a legacy third‑party ERP, flat files, and SQL-based data modeling with SAP BusinessObjects for visualization. This siloed landscape prevented a single source of truth, made reporting slow and technical, and left finance without live visibility into product margins and plant-level profitability.

Milcobel modernized one factory by adopting SAP S/4HANA and a unified data-and-analytics stack—SAP Datasphere on SAP HANA Cloud and SAP Analytics Cloud—using SAP’s Early Adopter Care. The implementation combined disparate sources into a single access layer, enabled real-time refresh and replication monitoring, compressed large data volumes (97.55% space savings), and empowered nontechnical users with graphical modeling and self-service analytics. The result: faster, more trusted profit and margin insights, broader analytics adoption (115 users by end of 2021, 265 GB loaded), improved collaboration, and a plan to migrate remaining factories.

Milcobel

Tim Van Overstraeten

Business Intelligence Analyst