fenaco is the largest agricultural cooperative in Switzerland, owned by 137 agricultural cooperatives and their members, including more than 23,000 active Swiss farmers. To promote the efficiency of agricultural businesses, fenaco supports its members with products, services and technologies along the entire value chain — from field to table. The cooperative offers solutions for sustainable, efficient and market-oriented agriculture across all production methods.
Simultaneously, fenaco takes agricultural products such as grain, potatoes, meat, eggs, vegetables and fruit, processes them into high-quality food products in its own facilities and markets them through various channels. In addition to its own LANDI and Volg brand stores, the cooperative also supplies other retailers, restaurant chains, hotels, hospitals and care homes.
Today, fenaco comprises renowned brands operating in four business areas: Agriculture, Food Industry, Retail and Energy. With over 11,000 employees and an annual turnover of 7.3 billion Swiss francs, the Group's companies play a central role in supplying the Swiss population with food, goods for daily use and energy.
At-a-Glance
The cooperative fenaco uses SUSE technologies to operate its extensive SAP system landscape with high availability, security and flexibility. By combining SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications, SUSE Multi-Linux Manager and SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching, fenaco reduces downtime, improves operational efficiency and increases the security of its hybrid IT infrastructure. Critical business processes in food production, logistics and retail remain continuously available — even during security-related updates.
Operation of SAP applications by IT subsidiary BISON
fenaco sees itself as a driver of innovation and promotes the use of new technologies in the Swiss agriculture, food and energy industries. Its own subsidiary, BISON, plays an important role in this: as a central IT service provider, BISON develops and operates software solutions for digital business processes for internal and external customers.
SAP business applications are of strategic importance to BISON. Among other things, BISON manages the business-critical SAP environments of the fenaco companies Ernst Sutter, frigemo, RAMSEIER and Volg. Additionally, fenaco manages central processes — such as HR and financial accounting — via SAP applications, which are also provided by BISON.
The internal IT service provider BISON is responsible for ensuring that the fenaco-LANDI Group's SAP solutions are consistently available and highly reliable. "In apple juice production at RAMSEIER, for example, we have systems that have to run 24 hours a day, especially during the harvest season. It is extremely difficult to find a slot for maintenance then," explains Marco Sudan, Service Owner SAP at BISON. "Every minute that the system is unavailable means a potential financial loss."
Several other processes are directly reliant on the continuous availability of IT systems: Point-of-sale systems in local stores, label printers for logistics, or systems for route planning and ramp control in goods handling. If the SAP system becomes unavailable, operations may come to a standstill. High availability is therefore a key objective to ensure business continuity.
"For us as fenaco's IT service provider, it is a major challenge to keep our systems up to date at all times, to install security updates promptly and at the same time not to restrict availability for users," says Wynand Lauwrens, System Specialist at BISON. "Especially in the SAP environment, where many business processes run in real time, downtimes are almost intolerable as they have a direct impact on business operations."
"SUSE provides us with the tools we need to further reduce operating costs and standardize our system landscapes. This allows us to run SAP environments that are resilient, scalable and ready for the future — while remaining flexible enough to meet the specific needs of the subsidiaries and business units of fenaco."
Why SUSE?
SUSE technologies have formed the foundation for SAP operations at fenaco for many years. fenaco partners with Adfinis, a trusted SUSE reseller, to procure and implement these solutions seamlessly. BISON operates the Group's entire SAP infrastructure on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications. The platform offers a system environment specially designed for SAP workloads with optimized configurations, tools for automated performance tuning and extended support runtimes. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications thus ensures stable, high-performance and maintenance-friendly operation — both for classic SAP instances and for SAP S/4HANA. The platform is certified by SAP and is officially recommended for productive use with SAP applications.
The SAP systems of fenaco-LANDI group are distributed across two geographically separate data centers, each with an active and a passive side. The data is continuously synchronized between them to allow for rapid failover in case of disruptions.
To simplify administration of this distributed, complex landscape, BISON relies on SUSE Multi-Linux Manager. The tool provides BISON with a centralized view across all Linux systems running SAP application and database servers, helping minimize operational overhead.
"SUSE Multi-Linux Manager gives us a complete overview of the status of our environment and provides us with powerful capabilities for patch and configuration management," explains Lauwrens. "We can manage all customer environments from a single console and ensure that the individual servers in an environment are always up-to-date and consistent."
BISON also implemented SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching to meet increased demands on the availability of SAP applications. This technology makes it possible to install security-relevant kernel updates during operation — without having to reboot the Linux systems. This means that business-critical SAP applications remain available without interruption — even during security-related maintenance work.
The impact of SUSE solutions
Ensures reliable digital business processes
"SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching is a real game changer for us," emphasizes Sudan. "We used to have to restart the servers every time a security update was released. As a result, SAP systems for production and logistics processes were often unavailable for an hour or more. Today, we can close security gaps immediately while business operations continue uninterrupted."
The BISON team can also efficiently plan and implement regular updates with SUSE Multi-Linux Manager. The team first tests new versions on internal systems, validates them and then implements them in a phased approach in the production systems. A rollback can also be carried out at any time in the event of unexpected issues.
Thanks to higher update frequency, BISON improves system security and significantly reduces the risk of unplanned downtime. Simultaneously, the IT team can react promptly to new requirements without jeopardizing the stability of business processes. This creates trust among internal customers and contributes significantly to high quality SAP operations.
Simplifies management of the complex SAP infrastructure
SUSE Multi-Linux Manager helps BISON manage a growing SAP landscape without added complexity. The team now operates around 80 Linux instances across development, test and production systems. As new clients come on board and software or infrastructure changes roll out, the environment continues to evolve — making centralized, streamlined management essential.
"Without a central solution like SUSE Multi-Linux Manager, it would hardly be possible to manage SAP operations efficiently," says Lauwrens. "Today, for example, we can display the patch status and system status of all systems at a glance. We can also use groups and filters to update the systems of individual customer environments in a targeted manner without having to touch each server manually. This not only saves time but also significantly reduces the risk of errors."
With SUSE Multi-Linux Manager, BISON always maintains an overview of the SAP infrastructure and can track all changes seamlessly. The solution also provides the IT team with standardized reports — including patch statuses, security vulnerabilities and installed software packages. This information supports the team during audits, helps with risk assessment and creates the necessary basis for secure and transparent operation of business-critical SAP systems.
Looking ahead, BISON plans to expand its use of SUSE Multi-Linux Manager alongside the open source solution Ansible to automate recurring configuration and installation processes, while also delivering standardized system templates. The team is also working on streamlining the system scope of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP® applications in a targeted manner. Due to the operating system’s modular structure, BISON can select the exact components required for the respective SAP application. It can also identify and remove unnecessary software packages, using SUSE Multi-Linux Manager to reduce the potential attack surface and improve the maintainability of the systems.
Enables flexible scalability in hybrid SAP environments
Originally, fenaco's SAP environments ran exclusively in the cooperative's own data centers. However, some individual companies have now begun operating their SAP systems on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The reason: "The cloud gives us the opportunity to provide new environments quickly and expand them flexibly as required — without long-term investments in hardware or complex local setups," explains Sudan.
With SUSE Multi-Linux Manager, BISON centrally manages both on-premises and cloud systems with identical management functions at all levels. This includes central patch and configuration management, reporting, monitoring of security vulnerabilities and the maintenance of consistent update and lifecycle strategies across all instances.
BISON is currently working on gradually integrating the SAP systems in GCP into this central administration. The aim is to control all systems via a common platform going forward, regardless of location.
The Volume License Agreement (VLA) between SUSE and BISON supports this strategy — especially for hybrid scenarios. New environments can be flexibly provisioned in the cloud and subsequently billed based on usage. "This helps us respond to customer requirements at short notice without immediately generating high fixed costs," says Lauwrens. "We only pay for the capacities that we actually use."
What's next for fenaco?
fenaco must complete its migration to S/4HANA by 2029. SUSE supports this transformation with proven best practices from past migrations, along with tools to monitor and optimize system performance and the flexibility to run existing systems in parallel — for example, in isolated instances used for testing. This approach lays the foundation for a step by step, low-risk migration to SAP S/4HANA without disruption.
Another key objective is to increase automation across operations — from provisioning and patch management to security monitoring. "SUSE provides us with the tools we need to further reduce operating costs and standardize our system landscapes," says Lauwrens. "This allows us to run SAP environments that are resilient, scalable, and ready for the future — while remaining flexible enough to meet the specific needs of each subsidiary and business unit."