Canadian Health and Wellness Brand Unifies Operations on SAP S/4HANA
July 16, 2025 | by Rick Kromkamp
A leading Canadian health and wellness company, known for its vitamins, minerals and nutritional supplements, had outgrown a patchwork of legacy systems built up through growth and acquisitions. With CONTAX as its SAP reseller and primary systems integrator, it replaced QAD, Deacom and spreadsheets with SAP S/4HANA, and went live in March 2025 across production, supply chain and finance.
At a Glance
The Customer
The company develops, manufactures and markets natural health products: vitamins and minerals, herbal remedies and specialty supplements, protein powders and probiotics. Its products are sold in over 45 countries, with a strong presence in North America and Asia. It has been in business for over 100 years, making it one of the longest-standing wellness brands in Canada.
The company runs its own GMP-certified manufacturing facilities in Windsor, Ontario, and puts a strong emphasis on quality assurance, sourcing transparency, sustainable sourcing and eco-conscious packaging.
The Challenge
Organic growth and a series of acquisitions had left the company running its operations on several legacy platforms, including QAD, Deacom and Excel. With data scattered across these systems, it was hard to streamline processes or produce consolidated reporting. To keep scaling, leadership needed one ERP platform across all business units.
The requirements were broad. Production scheduling had to be flexible enough to meet custom orders quickly without compromising quality. Materials management needed full visibility of inventory, with lot tracking, expiry management and control of transfers between internal sites and third parties, plus warehouse management with barcoded bins, mobile devices and custom RF workflows. As a regulated manufacturer, the company wanted automated quality checks and full lot traceability, and its R&D team wanted tools to manage recipes, plant trials and cost modeling.
The company also needed order management for EDI, web and email orders with little manual work and clear exception handling, automated EDI with its trading partners, and support for 3PL providers serving both direct-to-consumer and B2B channels. Demand planning had to support 12-18 month rolling forecasts that account for seasonal trends and promotions, with visibility of materials moving to and from co-packers. Procurement wanted purchasing decisions based on real-time data, and finance needed stronger accounting, AP/AR, costing, treasury and reporting.
The Solution
The company selected CONTAX as its SAP Value Added Reseller and primary systems integration partner. Together they implemented SAP S/4HANA as one ERP platform across all business functions, replacing the legacy systems and bringing the company's data and processes into one place.
Production and quality
Production scheduling, materials management and quality assurance run in S/4HANA. Automated quality control supports compliance and traceability.
Barcode warehouse
CONTAX developed custom RF transactions for barcode-based warehouse operations.
R&D
Recipe development, costing and version control are kept separate from day-to-day production.
Multi-channel orders
EDI, e-commerce, email and phone orders are handled in high volume with little manual work. Integrated shipping tools automate global documentation and carrier selection.
Planning and partners
Forecasting and distribution planning align inventory with seasons and promotions, with visibility of tolling, contract manufacturing and external 3PL warehouses.
Managed EDI
CONTAX's Arcus managed EDI service exchanges documents with trading partners in real time, so the company runs no EDI infrastructure of its own.
Procurement gained automation and real-time insight into supplier performance, and finance now works from a single source of truth for reporting, compliance and cost control.
Lessons Learned
Like many large ERP projects, this one met its biggest challenges in data readiness and change management.
Data quality affected several phases. Gaps in legacy data limited end-to-end testing, made training harder because users lacked realistic data to practice with, and caused bottlenecks at go-live that added to the support team's workload. CONTAX recommends an enterprise data strategy that comes before all other project activities: clear ownership of master data cleansing, measurable data quality targets, data workstreams that start well before testing and training, and a well-staffed support team at go-live.
On change management, end users at first struggled to see the wider impact of the new system and their changing roles. The lessons: validate business requirements before blueprinting, map current processes in detail, involve frontline users in process design, simulate new workflows before rollout and document role changes clearly.
The Results
- Live on SAP S/4HANA in March 2025 across production, supply chain, finance and more
- QAD, Deacom and other legacy systems consolidated into one ERP platform
- Data from legacy platforms and supplemental spreadsheets migrated in a single week
- Integrations with Shopify and other e-commerce platforms, Metro Supply Chain, Telus trade promotion management, Informatica, Snowflake and Tableau
- EDI fully automated and managed through CONTAX's Arcus service
"I would like to recognize and thank each and every one of you who has helped us get to this point. Your hard work and dedication to this project has not gone unnoticed. I know this has been a long process, but we are excited and ready for the next phase of growth ... I look forward to celebrating our continued growth with our new ERP in the months and years to come."
About CONTAX SAP S/4HANA Services
CONTAX is an SAP Gold Partner that sells and implements SAP S/4HANA as a Value Added Reseller and systems integrator, and runs Arcus, its fully managed cloud EDI service for SAP and Acumatica customers. Learn more about SAP S/4HANA and Arcus Cloud EDI.
About the Author
Rick Kromkamp
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