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Embedded product team · SAP Sapphire · ASUG

Consumer and Retail Central Finance (cFIN) S/4HANA SAP ECC Featured

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An embedded product team that rebuilt Cargill’s SAP experience across the enterprise

Years embedded. Dozens of apps, platforms, and analytics. One product team that kept shipping.

Cargill

By the numbers

  • Dozens of apps

    Fiori, UI5, mobile, and analytics across every business unit

  • Lower asset maintenance cost

  • Faster customer SLA processing, 3 days to 3 hours

  • 9/10

    Customer NPS for the program

Before

A string of one-off projects

  • Plant data, bank accounts, sales orders, and freight exceptions run by hand across spreadsheets, SharePoint, and email.
  • Every new problem meant a fresh project and a team that ramped up, then left.
  • No SAP-native, role-specific UX on top of ECC and S/4HANA.
  • Hard-won knowledge walked out the door at the end of each engagement.

After

One embedded product team

  • A standing team that owns the backlog and keeps shipping, year after year.
  • Parallel product squads under stable leadership, scaled up and down by demand.
  • One repeatable method, from Design Thinking workshop to hypercare.
  • Dozens of apps, platforms, and analytics across finance, asset management, logistics, plant maintenance, and the salt and feed businesses.
“A scalable, repeatable model: Digital Experience at Scale, repeated across multiple business units at an organization level.”
Cargill and Mindset ASUG, "Cargill's Design-Led Journey to SAP Fiori"

Why this matters

Most case studies are a single project. This is what it looks like when a client hands you their hardest backlog and you run it as an embedded product team for years. The operating model matters as much as any one app.

The challenge

Cargill runs thousands of plants across the globe, in salt, animal nutrition, branded feed, and finance. For years the work that kept those businesses moving lived in spreadsheets, SharePoint, email, and a patchwork of disconnected SAP transactions. At Cargill's scale that manual work was slow, error-prone, and almost impossible to govern.

The deeper problem was the model. Each new pain point meant another one-off project, another ramp-up, another team that learned the landscape and then left. Cargill did not need a string of projects. It needed a team that could own the hardest parts of its SAP experience and keep shipping.

What we did

Mindset stood up an embedded Digital Experience Product Team and ran it for years. Senior US architects and design leads, a scrum master, UX, and a deep engineering bench, organized as parallel product squads under one stable leadership group. The same people owned their products for years, not weeks.

The work spanned far more than a few workflows. Fiori and UI5 apps, native iOS and Android, finance analytics, data-quality platforms, plant-maintenance and asset-health systems, dashboards, and the Central Finance experience, across the salt, animal nutrition, branded feed, and finance organizations. Every build followed one method: Explore, Discover, Design, Deliver, Run and Scale, on a two-week sprint and eight-week program-increment cadence, inside Cargill's own change-control and governance. By 2019 Cargill was already presenting 20+ of these apps on the ASUG stage, and the team kept shipping for years after that.

The outcomes

The results held up across the whole portfolio. Asset Health Management moved asset criticality off SharePoint into clean UI5 apps, saving 80% of process time and cutting maintenance cost in half. The Bank Account Management experience on Central Finance lifted productivity 50% and efficiency 65% across 800 company codes. MyDataQ collapsed customer SLA processing from three days to three hours, a 90% reduction, and simplified data entry 85% across five apps. Work Order Time Entry raised maintenance visibility 75% and set the stage for predictive maintenance. The freight invoice workcenter added 40% efficiency, the shipping-capacity dashboard 20% productivity, and the deployment work took 10% out of SAP deployment spend.

Cargill scored the program a 9 out of 10. And the work did not stay inside the building. Cargill took it to the SAP main stage with us, at SAPPHIRE and ASUG.

If we built this today

Concept · not delivered scope

Today, we'd lead with AI, modern UX, and trusted data.

This is a forward-looking concept, not the scope we delivered on this engagement. It is the build we would reach for now, grounded in SAP that ships today.

The backlog that ran the plants, asset and plant data, bank accounts, sales orders, and freight exceptions, would not be a stack of screens in 2026. It would be an agent that does the heavy lifting, a clean-core experience that gets out of people's way, and a governed data product underneath both.

The data product

A governed asset and maintenance data product

Grounds the agent in trusted asset, maintenance-order, and finance semantics from across the landscape, so every recommendation reflects real equipment history rather than a copied extract. The plant and asset master data that used to sit in disconnected places, unified into one product.

SAP Business Data Cloud data product

The Joule agent

Asset maintenance agent

Reads equipment criticality, sensor and notification history, and open work orders across the plants, then proposes the right maintenance order and a ranked technician briefing so a planner approves instead of hunting through screens. The same asset backlog the embedded team once chased app by app, now worked by an agent.

SAP Joule · S/4HANA Asset Management (EAM) · Plant Maintenance (PM) · Asset Performance Management · Proposes, the planner approves · Maintenance cost per asset and mean time to repair

The Fiori app

A clean-core maintenance experience

Standard S/4HANA maintenance apps with Joule in the flow, so a request becomes a drafted order with criticality and history already pulled in. Modern, role-specific UX that retires the SharePoint and spreadsheet handoffs the old process leaned on, with no custom code to carry forward.

Clean core, with Joule in the launchpad

We would mine the real maintenance and finance processes in SAP Signavio first, map the ECC and S/4HANA estate in SAP LeanIX, and lean on MIND accelerators to carry the experience from old to new without losing what the product team already proved.

The Joule Agent Factory Process intelligence

What we built

  • 50% lower maintenance cost

    Asset Health Management

    Asset criticality and master data off SharePoint into clean UI5 apps.

  • +50% productivity

    Bank Account Management (cFIN)

    Workflow and signatory management across 800 company codes on Central Finance.

  • CFIN Embedded Analytics

    Real-time finance analytics built into the Central Finance experience.

  • SLA from 3 days to 3 hours

    MyDataQ

    A customer master-data platform: capture once, reuse everywhere, across five apps, global and finance.

  • Factory of the Future

    Paperless plant maintenance and operations on the shop floor.

  • +75% maintenance visibility

    Work Order Time Entry

    Maintenance execution for technicians out in the field.

  • +40% efficiency

    Freight Invoice Workcenter (VIM/TM)

    Freight exception handling for transportation and logistics.

  • +20% productivity

    Shipping Capacity Dashboard

    Real-time plant shipping capacity, unified from disparate systems.

  • 10% lower deployment spend

    TC2 Deployment Product

    Tooling to streamline how Cargill ships SAP changes.

  • Driver Check-in

    Smoother inbound truck flow and plant safety for the salt business.

  • 50% faster order entry

    CSR Sales Order tool

    Faster, simpler sales-order entry for customer service reps.

  • Native mobile apps

    iOS and Android for work orders, notifications, and timesheets, on a React Native foundation.

  • Branded Feed architecture

    Strategic UX and architecture for the branded feed business.

  • Fiori for iOS driver app

    The mobile transformation Cargill took to the SAPPHIRE main stage with us.

A look at the work

Mindset and Cargill team members together at a dinner during the engagement.
The Mindset delivery team for the Cargill engagement.
Team dinner during the Cargill engagement.
A full room of attendees at a Cargill client event presentation.
A Mindset design-thinking workshop in progress.
A Mindset team working session at a whiteboard.

Presented publicly

We took this work to the SAP stage.

Cargill took this work to the SAP stage with us more than once. By 2019 the program had grown to 20+ Fiori apps across multiple business units and geographies, presented under the customer's own name.