Savencia cuts SAP refresh times from days to hours

Overcoming the limits of standard SAP system copies 

Operating in the food and beverage industry, Savencia manages a complex SAP® landscape covering ERP Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and BW Business Warehouse (BW) systems across France, Germany and the USA.

Historically, non-production system refreshes relied on standard SAP system copies. This approach was increasingly misaligned with business needs. Refreshes were long and disruptive, often requiring complete environment shutdowns. BW system restores alone could take over 20 hours, followed by multiple days of post-processing.

Finding suitable refresh windows was difficult due to continuous export and import activities. In multi-client environments, client-level export and import was not possible, while partial refreshes were entirely unsupported.

As development and testing demands grew, Savencia needed a faster and more flexible way to refresh non-production systems, without impacting ongoing work.

Enabling flexible, on-demand SAP refreshes

Savencia selected EPI-USE Labs’ Data Sync Manager™ (DSM) Suite to replace full system copies with a selective, client-based refresh approach. DSM was implemented across ERP and BW landscapes to support time-sliced data refreshes aligned with both technical and business requirements.

Over more than a decade, DSM has been used to create sandbox systems in France, pre-production environments in Germany (including cloud-based systems) and to refresh ERP and BW non-production systems across multiple regions.

By standardising and automating refresh processes, DSM significantly reduced manual effort while providing a scalable solution that continues to evolve in line with SAP’s roadmap.

Faster refreshes, lower costs and greater control

With DSM, Savencia transformed its non-production SAP operations. Refresh cycles that previously took days were reduced to only a few hours. Data volumes were dramatically reduced, lowering infrastructure costs and simplifying system management.

Savencia teams gained the ability to refresh systems on demand, without disrupting development or testing activities. Manual tasks were minimised, operational risk was reduced and refreshes became easier to plan and execute across ERP and BW landscapes.

DSM has since become a long-term strategic solution for Savencia, supporting ongoing optimisation initiatives and future projects such as System Landscape Optimisation (SLO) activities and potential SAP S/4HANA migrations. It has proved to be a powerful asset within the business toolkit.

About Savencia

Focusing on cheese specialties and high value-added dairy ingredients (including brands such as Caprice des Dieux, St Môret and Tartare), Savencia Fromage & Dairy is among the world’s leading milk processors, the second cheese group in France and the fifth worldwide. Savencia Fromage & Dairy is an independent family group listed with Euronext Paris.