Enterprise SOA

ESA in action: Arla Foods

Arla Foods, like many companies, faced data challenges. One of its goals in adopting ESA was to create a global master data repository, a feat it has since achieved. Arla Foods is the largest dairy producer in Europe, generating more than 10 billion kilograms of fresh milk and nearly $8 billion in revenues each year. The company employs nearly 25,000 people worldwide, although most are located in its home markets of Sweden, Denmark, and the United Kingdom. Arla Foods is also one of the world's largest cooperative companies, composed of the 11,600 dairy farmers who are also its core suppliers. Cooperative members dominate Arla's board of directors and inform the company's strategic mission—to sell members' milk and process it into dairy products, which can command premiums and maximize profits for the members. To achieve its current size, Arla Foods and its predecessors executed dozens of mergers and acquisitions, leading to a very complex IT environment.

In hopes of resolving this heterogeneity and creating a flexible framework for future acquisitions, Arla embarked on the "One Arla" project five years ago with the goal of integrating nearly 170 customer, employee, producer, and vendor systems and solutions around a single SAP platform (see Figure 13-4). Arla's early solution to this challenge—which has MDM and application integration aspects—was to use SAP NetWeaver Exchange Infrastructure (SAP NetWeaver XI) to create proto-enterprise services beginning ...