SAP Integration for Global Food Manufacturing Cost-Modeling
Industry
Manufacturing
Company size
50 - 200 Employees
About
AGRANA is an internationally-oriented Austrian industrial company that adds value to agricultural commodities to create sustainable food and industrial products. With approximately 9,000 employees and €3.2 billion in revenue, it is the world's leading manufacturer of fruit preparations and a major European supplier of starch and sugar.
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The Situation
Agrana is a global leader in food and industrial products: fruit preparations, juice concentrates, starch, bioethanol. Their customers are large-scale food manufacturers — dairy, bakery, ice cream, confectionery — ordering ingredients at industrial quantities. An order for banana puree might be 100 tonnes. A fruit preparation specification might require dozens of raw material inputs priced simultaneously across multiple supplier relationships.
When a sales team needs to price a customer order of this scale, they need to pull current raw material prices from SAP, apply a cost-modelling methodology that accounts for production conditions (which silo, which packaging line, which market conditions), and produce a price. Doing this manually — navigating SAP's interface and reconciling data in Excel — was the process. It was slow, error-prone, and inconsistent across the sales team.
The Agrana application — internally named "Agrana" — was built to solve this: a web-based cost-modelling tool that integrates directly with SAP to pull live raw material data, applies Agrana's cost calculation methodology, and produces a price output that a salesperson can use with confidence.
Why they called us
SAP integration layer:
Live pull of raw material prices from SAP (customers, finished product BOMs, customer-material assignments, raw materials)
Data normalised into the Agrana cost calculation schema
Refresh cycle: prices updated on SAP sync, not cached indefinitely
Silo-based cost modelling: The Agrana production methodology is organised around silos — production units with specific conditions that affect cost. The cost model for a given order depends on which silo will produce it.
Silo configuration: basic settings, calculation patterns, production conditions, packaging specifications, impact matrix, raw material group assignments
Silo-specific raw material pricing: price overrides for specific raw materials when used in specific silos
Costing overview: full bill of materials (BOM) breakdown, show/hide capability for client presentations
Reporting:
Overview report: all active silos, current cost models, margin summary
Comparison reports: silo-specific raw material price comparison, production condition comparison, silo item comparison
The BOM presentation feature:
A key user request from the sales team: when presenting pricing to a customer, they wanted to be able to show or hide the BOM detail. Some customers wanted full ingredient and cost breakdown transparency. Others wanted a single price. The show/hide BOM feature let the salesperson control the presentation without creating two separate documents.
what you're buying
This is a case study in a very specific type of problem: a business process that works, but only just — held together by a combination of institutional knowledge, manual discipline, and tolerance for inconsistency. Agrana's sales team wasn't broken. They were pricing orders. It just took half a day, required SAP expertise most salespeople don't have, and produced results that varied depending on who was doing the work.
What Halcrow built wasn't a new process. It was the same methodology, made reliable. The SAP integration means the data is live. The calculation engine means the methodology is consistent. The BOM show/hide means the output is presentable. The salesperson still makes the call — they just make it in 15 minutes instead of four hours, with a number they can stand behind.
If you have a workflow that depends on people doing the right thing in the right order with the right data pulled from a system that wasn't designed for them — this is the type of engagement we do.
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Case study written May 2026. Agrana Fruit is a real client. SAP is Agrana's real ERP. All data sourced from project sprint records and client operational feedback.
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