A recipe for growth: how Meco Group is building its future on SAP
Behind many meals in Belgian restaurants, hotels, schools, hospitals and care homes, there is a name you have probably never heard: Meco Group. For decades, the group has been supplying Belgium’s food service and hospitality industry, with an ever wider range of products. To support their rapid growth, they moved to SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud with Flexso, choosing finance as the place to start.
Meco Group began as a meat company in 1976 and has grown into a full food service supplier. Alongside meat, they now distribute fish, vegetables, ready-made meals, plant-based products and more. The group holds a growing number of entities, plus a transport company that ships 140,000 kilos of food products a week from the production site in Oostende and the cross-docking platform in Charleroi.
Growth brings complexity
As Meco expanded across the country, complexity grew with it. Finance was juggling an ERP system, a separate accounting tool and a collections system, with no shared view across the group. Beyond finance, the procurement, sales, manufacturing and logistics teams also missed insight.
“Much of the information we had lived in people’s heads,” says Jurrian Degrande, Meco’s Business Controller. “For a company with real ambitions to grow, we had to move beyond this setup.”
One single integrated IT platform on SAP
The objective was broad from the start: implement a new IT platform that would integrate finance, procurement, sales and logistics.
“We wanted a platform that would support us for the long term,” Jurrian explains. “So after analyzing our existing processes and requirements, we shortlisted two leading ERP systems. SAP S/4HANA was then the best option, as we had made a deliberate choice to follow the standard, rather than bend the system to the existing processes. The standard best practices built into SAP S/4HANA fit our situation closely.”
The choice for Flexso as implementation partner came down to fit too. “Their flexibility, the short decision lines and the pragmatic way of working matches how Meco Group works.”
Flexso’s flexibility, the short decision lines and the pragmatic way of working matches how Meco Group works.
Finance first: a clean, standardized core
Rather than change everything at once, Meco Group chose a phased approach. They started with finance and non-food procurement.
“Finance simply is the basis of every organization, so we wanted to get that right first” Jurrian says. “Our finance team is compact. Five people handle the books for the whole group, and they were moving between three systems all day. Even within the accounting software, every entity sat on its own, with its own chart of accounts and no overview across the group. Consolidation was handled by an external consultant, based on the data our team exported manually.”
“A clean, standardized finance core would make every later step easier: from adding logistics, bringing a new entity on board or finally connecting commercial flows to financial reporting.”
One group, one view for reporting and insights
To ensure a smooth migration, Flexso used the SAP Activate methodology. In iterative workshops, they invited Meco Group to hold the standard SAP finance processes up against their own way of working and decide what fit. The complexity could then be tackled in pieces, from harmonizing the chart of accounts and the finance calendar to setting up consolidation in SAP S/4HANA.
With one shared structure across all entities, Jurrian expects finance to win time and insight. “Intercompany, for example, will be a clear win,” says Jurrian. “In a group our size, transactions between entities pile up fast, and reconciling them by hand takes time. SAP’s Intercompany Matching and Reconciliation will help us match transactions and resolve differences ourselves, in real time, without leaning on IT.”
Group reporting tells the same story. Consolidation now sits directly in the SAP S/4HANA core, replacing the external process that ran on manual data. “Before, every consolidation cycle started with collecting files, chasing numbers and patching together a partial picture,” Jurrian continues. “Now that the data is there, in real time, we’ll be able to close faster and see the full group results in one complete, reliable view across all entities.”
SAP Cloud ERP: built to grow
The finance system went live at the start of Meco Group’s fiscal year. In the meantime, the second phase is underway: the project team is exploring how to harmonize and optimize food procurement, sales and warehousing. That is where the biggest operational impact will be felt: when logistics and manufacturing are fully integrated, the whole business will run on one shared platform.
“Beyond that, we’ll be looking into budgeting, allocations, costing, production accounting, inventory valuation and margin analysis in a next phase. With a clean, standard core in place, taking on the next scope, or including a new entity, will become much easier,” Jurrian concludes.
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