Dairy Farmers of America

Headquartered in Kansas City, Daily Farmers of America (or DFA) is a global dairy foods company owned by dairy farmers. With over 8,500 member farms and over 14,000 members, DFA focuses on selling milk products as well as enhancing the community it is made up of. From helping farmers shape up their business to taking a sustainable approach by staying green, DFA represents its purpose and passion to make every member’s day better.

Made up of family farmers, DFA has a diversified product portfolio. Its 42 manufacturing units work tirelessly to produce fresh milk and yogurt, shelf-stable beverages, and dairy foods. DFA’s $14.6 billion annual revenue makes it the largest dairy company in the Unites States of America, and the fourth largest in the world. This leads to a huge influx of data, resulting in a number of data centers spread all over the country.

The major challenges DFA faced with maintaining over 15 data centers were of complexity, inflexibility, and cost efficiency. And this challenge prompted a much-needed IT transformation for DFA.

Due to Microsoft’s strong position in the ‘cloud’ marketplace and DFA’s previous positive encounters with Azure, Microsoft Azure turned out to be an obvious choice for this IT transformation. Azure’s Site Recovery Services that facilitate an enhanced VMware to Azure migration helped in this.

Khoj Information Technology, a SAP Silver partner and a Microsoft Gold Partner, helped DFA with their SAP migration. With the move group approach and Azure Site Recovery as the principle migration technology, this approach turned out to be seamless. Mock validations played an important role in risk mitigation during the migration of SAP and Bolt-On.

This two-month-long process left a number of valuable lessons for all the people involved, the first and most important one being all applications should not be migrated on a single weekend (an activity that can lead to outages causing high risk). The team realized the importance of limiting the scope of mock and avoiding touching the production environment. As changes to the lift and shift approach must be carefully considered (net new installs, upgrades/patches to environment or landscape, repointing of environments), it is always better to go with new builds.

The SAP Ecosystem Migration for two data centers resulted in an annual savings of $2.5 million and an internal rate of return of 117% for DFA. A 50% cost reduction in the acquisition of data center integrations and the reduction of monthly downtimes from 12 hours to 60 minutes turned out to be a commendable achievement, considering cows don’t take vacations.

This migration also resulted in reduced exposure to cyber threats like Meltdown and Spectre. DFA’s IT transformation project aimed to unleash innovation by eliminating rigid contracts restricting access to new technologies, a goal wonderfully achieved by the end of the project. Now DFA is a wish away from unlocking technologies like Data Lake, Blockchain, etc.