Empresas Ariztía is a Chilean agribusiness and food group with over 130 years of family tradition. The company is vertically integrated from corn and feed production to poultry farming, slaughtering, processed product lines, and distribution—demanding robust, 24/7 available information systems. With SAP as its corporate standard, Ariztía is advancing a four-phase program to migrate its subsidiaries to this solution.
Previously on SAP version 2019, the company needed to upgrade to S/4HANA 2023 to extend SAP’s official support through 2030 and continue progressing through the next phases of its rollout.
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Challenges of upgrading to S/4HANA 2023
“Our main challenge was operational continuity”, says Pablo Tirado, Ariztía’s Technology and Innovation Manager, recalling the performance issues experienced during phase 1 of their SAP program.
The go-live window was extremely narrow: it had to happen right after the high-demand Christmas/New Year season and before the January accounting close—without affecting sales or distribution.
Initial situation
- SAP S/4HANA and PO: Implemented in 2022, but only for the company’s commercial area. All poultry operations and production plants still ran on legacy systems.
- Implementation and support by Novis: For the SAP implementation, Novis provided the AWS infrastructure platform, system architecture, communications, SAP administration, and platform support to power Ariztía’s systems. Since then, Novis has been responsible for operational continuity, with SLAs covering availability and transactional response times.
- Support limitation: SAP’s policy accelerated the need to upgrade. Moving to version 2023 extended official support through 2030.
- 24/7 AWS operation: The platform was already on public cloud and needed to remain there—with high availability and scalability managed by Novis.
- Next phase: Include poultry operations and production plants.
Novis Solution
| Phase |
Duration |
Key Deliverables |
| Exploration |
2 months |
Detailed impact analysis and project timeline |
| Realization |
2 months |
Remote technical and functional upgrade |
| Testing |
3 weeks |
Unit and integration testing with key users |
| Post-go-live support |
1 month |
Assistance with first accounting close |
Pablo Tirado explains why they chose Novis:
“Novis is currently our BASIS provider; they’ve been with us since the beginning, and we also use their AWS infrastructure.
We’ve had excellent service, and we decided to carry out this project with them as well—their know-how gave us a big advantage in implementing the upgrade quickly.”
The project was managed 100% remotely. Novis coordinated technical and functional consultants, escalated incidents directly to SAP, and led weekly committees with Ariztía to anticipate deviations.
“We held weekly meetings to detect deviations… Novis stayed with us for a full month after go-live to assist with the accounting close, which was a major milestone for the project’s success.”
Results Achieved
-
Seamless go-live
“The production cutover was done over a weekend: dispatches ended Saturday at 2 p.m., work continued through Sunday at 9 p.m., and a rollback plan was in place for contingencies. Everything went smoothly—we had one issue, which was resolved on the fly, but nothing that interrupted operations. By Sunday night we were up and running. We ran full test cycles, including WMS and distribution center integrations.” Tirado summarizes.
-
Continuity and performance
Now running SAP version 2023, with official support through 2030.
Expanded AWS machines and increased memory improved integration performance and accounting processes.
-
Project team and governance
The project was completed on time and within budget.
“I’d like to highlight the project team’s professionalism—they were rigorous in meeting deadlines and milestones, with great governance. They worked seamlessly with Ariztía’s internal IT team,” Tirado notes.
“Novis’ consulting team was a pleasant surprise: highly capable and very available. All in all, we’ve been working with Novis for over three years now, and the service has been excellent.”
Conclusion and Lessons Learned
“The key is in user testing; thorough, integrated testing ensures a smooth go-live. You also need to have a rollback plan,”, advises Ariztía’s CIO.
With the upgrade live and performance optimized, Ariztía moves into the second phase of its program: rolling out SAP S/4HANA to all production and back-office subsidiaries. The successful collaboration with Novis confirms that having an experienced partner—both functionally and technically—makes all the difference in critical cloud-based SAP projects.
Ariztía completed the upgrade without disrupting logistics for its 200 trucks and 45,000 active customers. With the platform now on SAP S/4HANA 2023 and optimized AWS infrastructure, the company is moving forward to phase 2: integrating all poultry operations into the same ERP system.
Want to know more about Novis services? Contact us today.
Written by Gilda Valderrama, Novis Bulletin Editor.
Related notes:
Chile
México
Estados Unidos
