EDEKA-Group Fills Its Shelves with SAP

Germany’s Leading Grocery Retailer Ensures Competitive Edge with SAP® for Retail

HAMBURG, Germany.- Strengthening its position as one of the leading solutions providers to retailers around the world, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced that German-based EDEKA-Group will implement SAP® for Retail solutions to ensure an integrated merchandise planning process, reduce IT operating costs and support enterprise growth through a flexible enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA). With revenues of more than EUR 37 billion, EDEKA-Group is Germany’s leading grocery retailer and is currently facing a business challenge to consolidate its IT activities with its new subsidiary LUNAR GmbH.

LUNAR GmbH acts as the IT center of excellence for EDEKA-Group and will be enlarged by up to 250 employees. The company aims to complete the reorganization of its IT landscape and bundle its operational business processes within a cross-group strategy.

“The consolidation of our IT infrastructure will allow us to cut costs by several hundred million euros,” said Alfons Frenk, CEO of EDEKA AG. “We will optimize the entire process chain within the group in order to operate in a more competitive and agile manner.”

“EDEKA is at the leading edge of the highly competitive retail market,” says Léo Apotheker, Deputy CEO, SAP AG. “Their long-term, strategic approach to an integrated enterprise resource planning system will provide standardised, transparent access to mission-critical data to speed up company response times and lower costs which is ultimately of benefit to EDEKA customers. SAP is extremely proud to partner with one of the premier names in retail.”

Integrated Enterprise Resource Planning The SAP for Retail solutions will allow EDEKA-Group to maintain consistent quality regarding item numbers, master data and product group structures. Additionally, EDEKA-Group will be able to ensure data transfer across all retail locations and regional subsidiaries. EDEKA-Group is also using the SAP® ERP application and the SAP NetWeaver® technology platform to harmonize its merchandise planning and control systems. In the future, the group’s major business areas, which comprise the wholesale and the retail business, will be managed by SAP solutions.

Flexible IT ArchitectureOver the past few months, the IT experts at EDEKA and SAP worked together to complete a current-state processes analysis. The team examined enterprise resource planning processes for wholesale and retail, master data management and the cross-company reporting system and provided the basis for the implementation phase. Going forward, various business units will display their business processes in an “EDEKA business process pool,” based on a flexible enterprise service-oriented architecture. To achieve this, EDEKA will deploy the SAP NetWeaver technology platform as well as the analytical tools of SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence (SAP NetWeaver BI), SAP NetWeaver Master Data Management (SAP NetWeaver MDM) and SAP NetWeaver Exchange Infrastructure (SAP NetWeaver XI) for integration- and interface management.