Highline Mushrooms

Founded in 1961, Canadian company Highline Mushrooms (Highline) is one of the largest growers of fresh mushrooms in North America. In April 2016, the company was acquired by Ireland-based Fyffes, the fourth largest and oldest importer of bananas and tropical fruit importers and distributors. A year later, Fyffes was acquired by Japanese trading company Sumitomo Corporation.

Highline continued to operate under Fyffes, eventually sharing an instance of SAP S/4HANA with Fyffes that was hosted at a U.K. data center and managed by a thirdparty provider. This model proved to be challenging, however, as it did not give Highline the autonomy it needed to manage growth efficiently. In April 2021, the situation changed when Sumitomo made the decision to divest Highline from Fyffes, putting Highline directly under Sumitomo.

As part of the carve-out, Highline needed to separate its shared instance from Fyffes and deploy its own S/4HANA environment. Given the project’s complexity, Highline needed an experienced partner to guide the company through the process.

Highline chose Navisite because the team brought the SAP and cloud migration expertise needed for the project along with a clear roadmap forward that involved a liftand-shift migration from the U.K. data center to a Highline-owned Amazon Web Services (AWS) environment.

For any grower and supplier of a time-sensitive agricultural product, harvesting, packaging and distribution must be seamlessly coordinated to ensure the product’s quality when it reaches the store. At Highline, all three stages happen on the same day. S/4HANA is at the core of these and other operations at Highline, handling everything from sales to production to order management and finance. Given the importance of S/4HANA to the business, Highline could not afford downtime during the migration.

When Navisite was brought on board in October 2021, the team faced a tight migration deadline of early January, just after the holiday rush. Within three months, Navisite worked with Highline to design, plan and execute the migration of S/4HANA from the data center to AWS. While every part of the process was compressed to meet the deadline, including testing cycles, the close collaboration and planning between the teams led to a smooth cutover.

The result: Highline exceeded its deadline by 24 hours. Navisite’s experience with S/4HANA and AWS was key to the success, ensuring Highline could accelerate the migration smoothly—from the technical components and licensing to having the right people and coverage at all times.

Today, Highline’s S/4HANA implementation is operating at a stable, steady state and the company relies on Navisite for ongoing management. Navisite manages both Highline’s AWS infrastructure, including cloud servers, monitoring and backups, and its SAP environment, from the S/4HANA application to the database to the operating system with SAP Basis support.

Now that Highline is independent with its own S/4HANA application and getting support from Navisite, the company is operating more efficiently and at a faster pace than before. And with S/4HANA residing on AWS cloud instead of on-premises, Highline has seen faster performance—the data connection speeds from SAP data stores to the company’s Tableau business intelligence (BI) tool are as much as 15 times faster. Refreshing data sources is now a matter of minutes versus an hour previously, which has made information more readily available for decision-making.

With Navisite’s technical roster and SAP experience to help with any issue, whether it’s change management, technology or cloud-related, Highline’s team can focus on the business.