Unibake uses Dynamics 365 to power productivity and growth for global bakeries

Lantmännen Unibake, a leading European bakery group, faced challenges with fragmented IT systems, making it difficult to optimize planning, manage supply chains, and support business growth in a dynamic 24/7 industry.

Unibake uses Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management to improve efficiency, boost productivity, and enable growth in a fast-paced industry.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 has been deployed to optimize productivity, streamline operations, and enhance delivery scheduling for bakery products, aiming to ensure consistent service quality and operational reliability.

Lantmännen Unibake is one of Europe’s largest bakery groups, providing freshly baked and bake-off (goods that are sold pre-bake) products for restaurants, grocery stores, and other retail and foodservice customers in over 60 markets worldwide. The company has 6,000 employees and an annual revenue of €1.5 billion.

To support its continued growth and improve operational efficiency, Unibake transitioned to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, replacing a fragmented IT setup with a modern, unified platform. Today, the company runs a standardized, template-based solution that streamlines transactions and better supports business expansion.

“Dynamics 365 gives us a modern, highly available platform that updates automatically.”

Carina Harders, Chief Information Officer, Lantmännen Unibake

Fragmented systems in need of a new recipe

Lantmännen Unibake (Unibake), part of Swedish agricultural cooperative Lantmännen, is a global leader in bake-off and freshly baked products. The company runs more than 30 large-scale international bakeries and is among the largest bakery groups in Europe. Each year, the company produces more than 500,000 tons of breads and pastries—about 20 times the weight of the Statue of Liberty.

Unibake operates in a low-margin, high-volume industry where efficiency is a key focus. Operational efficiency is especially important in the company’s fresh bread business, with grocery stores relying on Unibake to deliver the freshest bakery products on time. “We’re in a dynamic 24/7 industry,” says Carina Harders, Chief Information Officer for Lantmännen Unibake. “We produce thousands of products every day, which means we receive orders in the evening and the products need to leave our bakeries and be on the shelves for consumers the next morning. That’s why it’s critical we have a highly available and reliable technology platform. We can’t afford to close operations at any time. At the same time, we also need that high availability to support our bake-off business.”

Unibake runs a complex setup with different companies across countries that trade with each other. “We must be able to optimize our planning and supply chain across our markets, which is challenging with our fragmented business model,” Harders says. “Some markets sell directly to customers, while others go through distributors. That mix makes it hard to plan and manage things like supply chains and pricing in a smooth way. It requires a common global platform that brings it all together; makes pricing more consistent, improves supply chain planning, and supports better coordination between the countries.”

Unibake knew it needed to improve its IT systems to support the business. The company was still using older on-premises systems like Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 and other legacy software that made it hard to grow and work efficiently—it needed a setup that could keep up with its growth. “We’ve expanded a lot through acquisitions and organically, and we need the right technology to keep growing now and in the future,” Harders says.

Finding the right mix to streamline operations

Unibake chose to implement Microsoft Dynamics 365 to meet the need for a standardized solution. “The journey to the cloud and the vision of building a common platform had already begun several years ago,” says Harders. “In the years since, we’ve strengthened the focus on business processes and best practices, and with strong support from leadership the move to Dynamics 365 has gained real momentum. Dynamics 365 gives us a modern, highly available platform that updates automatically.”

Unibake internal IT teams worked together with implementation partner Scales Group to design a new solution based on Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. The new solution is built to standardize key processes across the company, such as system administration, inventory and warehouse management, production control, procurement, accounts payable and receivable, master planning, and the general ledger.

Unibake first rolled out the solution to a bake-off bakery in Germany and a fresh bread bakery in Estonia. Both bakeries use a template-based approach to align processes with Unibake’s business structure, which is built around Plan, Produce, Warehouse, Procure to Pay, and Order to Cash. The solution integrates with Unibake’s existing Dynamics 365 Sales environment, along with a third-party demand planning application and Microsoft Azure Data Lake Storage. “Now that we have our template in place, we intend to deploy Dynamics 365 at all our bakeries in the future,” says Camilla Broe, Solution Architect for Lantmännen Unibake.

Unibake is also taking advantage of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management features to help maintain competitive pricing and optimize planning functions. For example, the company is using Unified pricing management in Supply Chain Management, which creates rules based on attributes such as customer segments, product categories, and order types and allows for flexibility in price, discount, and charge attributes. As an early adopter of this new feature, Unibake worked closely with Microsoft to share feedback and recommend enhancements. Additionally, Unibake uses the Planning Optimization feature in Supply Chain Management, which replaces the legacy master planning engine. This feature gives Unibake the flexibility to run planning more often, with minimal impact on overall performance. As a result, Unibake can easily manage large volumes of order lines that need to be planned for production around the clock to support operations that run all day, every day.

Following the initial rollouts in Germany and Estonia, Unibake plans to implement the new solution in Finland, its largest fresh product location.

“Now that we have our template in place, we intend to deploy Dynamics 365 at all our bakeries in the future.”

Camilla Broe, Solution Architect, Lantmännen Unibake

Fueling growth

With Dynamics 365, Unibake now runs on a standardized, template-based platform that supports both its fresh and bake-off bakery production. “By replacing multiple local ERP systems with a single global platform that updates automatically, we are streamlining operations and making it much simpler to integrate new bakeries into our business,” says Harders.

“By replacing multiple local ERP systems with a single global platform that updates automatically, we are streamlining operations and making it much simpler to integrate new bakeries into our business.”

Carina Harders, Chief Information Officer, Lantmännen Unibake

Simplifying pricing and intercompany transactions

Unibake is simplifying its pricing management through unified pricing management in Supply Chain Management. “We decided early on to adopt the Dynamics 365 unified pricing feature to avoid building custom extensions ourselves,” says Martin Schweinberger, Solution Owner for Sales and Business Controlling for Lantmännen Unibake. “Unified pricing is especially helpful in our fresh business, where speed and accuracy are critical. It helps us make better buying and selling decisions and improves efficiency and productivity across the supply chain.”

In addition, automated and streamlined order processing in Dynamics 365 simplifies intercompany transactions, ensuring accurate item numbers, quantities, and prices on all intercompany orders. “Once Dynamics 365 is fully rolled out intercompany transactions will be automated, making planning, purchasing, and selling easier across our global supply chain,” says Harders.

“We decided early on to adopt the Dynamics 365 unified pricing feature to avoid building custom extensions ourselves. Unified pricing is especially helpful in our fresh business, where speed and accuracy are critical.”

Martin Schweinberger, Solution Owner for Sales and Business Controlling, Lantmännen Unibake

Innovation on the rise

Unibake is also exploring how generative AI can support its business—beginning with Microsoft 365 Copilot for Sales and a tool in Dynamics 365 Finance that helps automate account reconciliation. “It’s still early, but we see potential to improve forecasting, reduce waste, and make smarter pricing decisions," says Harders.

Looking ahead, Unibake plans to expand Dynamics 365 to multiple of its bakeries in Finland the next year. The aim is to keep building momentum with up to three Dynamics 365 go-lives a year.