Vion Food Group is one of the largest meat suppliers in Europe, with production facilities across the Netherlands and Germany. The 4.6 billion EUR company prepares and distributes meat and vegan products, supplying food to around 100 million people a day. Over the past 40+ years, Vion has grown through acquisitions and now employs 8,000 people, partners with 400,000 suppliers, serves 100,000 customers and operates four business units that focus on pork, beef, retail and food service.
Challenges
M&A leaves behind a heavy data legacy
Decades of mergers and acquisitions left Vion with a complex technology legacy that included 13 ERP systems, a fragmented application landscape and a decentralized data environment. The company was weighed down by manual processes, complicated information flows and recurring data errors.
This data management challenge was particularly pressing for Vion due to the scale of its operations. More than 400,000 farms across several European countries supply livestock to the company, and to support animal welfare and food traceability requirements, Vion needed to track the animals entering its facilities and the food products leaving them.
When data was outdated or inconsistent, this made it difficult to maintain consistent oversight. For example, a supplier delivering animals to multiple Vion sites required coordinated controls across locations. Without accurate and up-to-date master data, centrally coordinating such supplier controls across sites was a complex and manual task.
Another challenge was supporting the organization through the transition to centralized data management. The fragmented nature of the existing data landscape meant that local teams had developed strong, autonomous ways of working. For the initiative to succeed, these teams needed to move toward a shared, standardized data model and a more collaborative way of working across the organization.
“With 13 ERP systems and locally managed changes, you have to stay constantly ahead of your data. Moving to a centralized model makes it clear why a single source of truth and strong governance are essential.” - Carmen Karg, Manager of Master Data Management, Vion GmbH
To summarize, Vion faced the following challenges.
- A huge legacy of disparate ERP platforms and disconnected systems, which resulted in a fragmented, decentralized data environment
- Regulatory imperatives to track and trace the origin of every animal and every product, despite not having a centralized system capable of doing so
- Inconsistent, unreliable and inaccurate data that was often manually input and changed by local teams
- A workforce used to managing its data independently, without a central data storage
Solutions
A unified MDM foundation and new governance model
With multiple ERP systems, including SAP S/4HANA, to bring into the fold, the Vion team needed a single source of truth. It wanted to create a unified data foundation, integrating 20+ target systems, including its planning tools, finance platform, purchasing, supply management, and reporting and analytics platforms.
Vion selected Stibo Systems Platform for its robust multidomain master data management (MDM) capabilities. The MDM would act as the central point of governance for the company’s product, supplier, business partner and location data. The new governance model enables data stewards to enforce data standards, validate requests through 40+ workflows, and check for duplicate entries and data. This approach reduced email-based coordination by approximately 60%, significantly lowering manual administrative work.
Once centralized, data is then pushed in a controlled manner out to the different target systems, ensuring one source of truth prevailed over multiple local data edits.
As with any transformation of this scale, the transition required thoughtful change management and close collaboration across the organization. The company listened to its teams, accommodated requirements as needed and provided training, ensuring success.
“For us, stakeholder alignment was critical. With dozens of data models in place, we had to bring everyone to the table, understand what mattered to each team, and agree on a shared approach. Aligning on a central data model was one of the biggest challenges and also one of the most important foundations for success.” - Carmen Karg, Manager of Master Data Management, Vion GmbH
Part of the process was introducing and enforcing business frameworks and business rules to reduce the amount of manual work required by the various teams while the solution was rolled out. Third-party integration via APIs also helped; by Dutch law, organizations like Vion have to make supplier size determinations, so the ability to plug Dun & Bradstreet into the central MDM was invaluable. The Stibo Systems Platform is also connected with over 50 interfaces for distributing information to the various ERPs, as well as financial and planning systems.
“Data migration was a key part of our transformation. Aligning data from multiple systems into a single, consistent structure allows us to establish a strong master data foundation. We started in 2019, reached a major milestone in 2024 and continue to build on this foundation as new needs emerge.” - Matthias Schumann, Team Lead, MDM Customer and Supplier, Vion Services GmbH
The team built a robust multidomain MDM foundation, bringing together product, supplier, business partner, and location data. The implementation followed a carefully sequenced rollout over five years, progressing domain by domain and gradually connecting target systems to ensure continuity and avoid disruption.
The company experienced the following technology benefits:
- A single, centralized master data platform: The company now operates from one source of truth for product, supplier, business partner, and location data, ensuring consistent information across all connected ERP and downstream systems.
- Automated, workflow-driven data processes: Standardized workflows streamlined the onboarding, validation, and enrichment of master data, reducing manual coordination and approval cycles.
- Better data quality: Centralized governance, validation rules, and duplicate checks significantly reduced data errors and inconsistencies across domains and systems.
- Improved traceability and compliance for livestock: Centralized livestock, supplier, and product data enables end-to-end traceability, helping Vion meet animal welfare, food safety, and regulatory reporting requirements more reliably.
- Time savings through automation: Once data was flowing automatically to the various ERPs, local data steward teams saw demands on their time reduce by 60%.
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Summary
Improved efficiencies, compliance and accuracy
Vion’s particular challenges represented a perfect storm: compliance demands, a vast legacy technology infrastructure, highly distributed, autonomous teams working and reporting in a non-uniform manner, and huge numbers of stakeholders, suppliers and customers at varying levels of maturity, ability and size.
By starting with technology, governance, data stewardship, culture and engagement, the company reshaped its legacy data infrastructure into a centralized, reliable and future-ready MDM environment that now delivers efficiency, transparency and long-term value.
