King Arthur Baking Company, founded in 1790, was America’s first flour company. Today, it is a 100% employee-owned Benefit Corporation, committed not only to delivering the highest-quality baking ingredients and resources, but also to doing what’s right for people and the planet. Headquartered in Vermont, KAB operates across retail, wholesale, manufacturing, and education sectors. It serves both B2B and B2C customers through a diverse array of channels, including a long-established catalog business, eCommerce, wholesale EDI, phone orders, and experiential retail locations that comprise full-service bakeries, cafés, baking schools, and retail pop-up locations. KAB’s innovation in the baking space and complex operational footprint necessitated a modern, scalable technology infrastructure to support KAB’s continued growth, especially after it became the number one flour company across many categories in the United States.

Unifying Omnichannel Operations

One of the most significant challenges for growth was the company’s legacy technology, which included a homegrown order entry system built on an aging eCommerce platform. This setup lacked the scalability and omnichannel cohesion required to support KAB’s active and expanding brand. Therefore, it set out to modernize its systems and unify all operations on SAP S/4HANA, which would provide a seamless experience across all customer touchpoints, including B2B, B2C, catalog, eCommerce, EDI, phone, and retail. As David Wren, Vice President of Information Technology of KAB, noted, “Customers don’t experience your channels. They experience your brand.”  Thus, to truly deliver on this brand promise, KAB needed what Wren called “a central lens” for servicing diverse customer needs.

DataXstream OMS+ With SAP S/4HANA

As part of its unified operations strategy, KAB chose to implement DataXstream’s OMS+ in conjunction with SAP S/4HANA ecosystem. This decision was driven by the recognition that OMS+ offered significantly better omnichannel enablement compared to native SAP functionality, especially for complex and varied order types. “We were particularly impressed with the architecture of the OMS+ solution that allowed us to do things like quickly integrate with Braintree APIs for payments, with Talon One from a promotions engine perspective, and with Shipper HQ for shipping information,” Wren said. “The solution also enables us to integrate our loyalty platform and program for our direct consumers.” This flexibility provides the cohesion for KAB’s unique lines of business, including those that were not integrated initially.

A Transformative Impact

The implementation of OMS+ has yielded immediate and significant improvements across several key areas.

Omnichannel Order Capture

OMS+ is now the central hub for all KAB’s customer orders. This includes orders from the web, phone, catalog, EDI, or retail transactions. It provides agents with a 360-degree view of each customer, regardless of the channel they use. This view ensures consistency and brand integrity across all interactions. Call center teams now have 100% visibility into transactions, whether from retail, catalog, or eCommerce, enabling them to see a complete customer history at their fingertips.

Configurable, Role-Based Screens

Recognizing the vast difference between wholesale commodity orders and direct-to-consumer eCommerce interactions, OMS+ allows for tailored, simplified views for different user roles. This capability enables EDI orders from grocers to be reviewed and adjusted directly through OMS+, thereby boosting efficiency and improving fulfillment flow-through. As Wren emphasized, “It’s all about efficiency and flow-through to fulfillment.” Direct-to-consumer and wholesale teams benefit from the optimized screens and layouts of OMS+, allowing them to save multiple layouts and switch easily between areas of focus, such as pricing, shipping, or supplier information.

Rapid Onboarding for Seasonal Employees

The company's sales spike significantly from October to December. During this time, KAB relies heavily on temporary staff in its call centers and retail locations. However, OMS+ has dramatically eased the training burden for new hires thanks to its intuitive graphical user interface (GUI), consistent navigation, and the ability to configure screens to display only relevant information for each role. “The consistency of OMS+ is a huge selling point. It’s intuitive, and new employees can use it almost right away,” Wren stated. In fact, it has already led to a 25% reduction in new-hire training time.

Quantifiable Results

Live since March 31, 2025, KAB is already observing tangible benefits from its OMS+ implementation:

• Efficiency gains: Call center staff no longer need to navigate multiple systems, benefiting from a single platform for order entry, customer account maintenance, refunds, and shipments. This has resulted in a 25% reduction in clicks for primary tasks, drastically cutting call times and customer wait times.
• Improved data visibility: Teams now have true, real-time inventory numbers to share with customers.
• Enhanced customer service: The integration of KAB’s loyalty platform enables call center agents to instantly view a customer’s loyalty tier, points, and available coupons, providing more personalized service and upsell opportunities.
• Wholesale operational streamlining: Complex, multi-line, multi-ship wholesale orders, often involving royalty calculations and bulk scenarios of up to 160 lines, previously required manual entry. With OMS+, KAB can now process these in bulk, representing what Wren termed as a “significant efficiency gain” for the team. He added, “Reviewing and searching  inventory available to promise screens in OMS+   are very streamlined compared to native SAP.”

The OMS+ implementation has also supported KAB’s clean core strategy and SAP extensibility goals. Wren highlighted that this strategic project was not just about technology, but was very much a business-led, technology-enabled project, conceived and executed to enable business growth and prepare for scale.

Future Vision and Lessons Learned

Important to the success of this complex transformation was the strong stakeholder alignment and collaborative thinking on a big-picture level. The KAB team ensured that all stakeholders were on the same page early in the process, acknowledging the project’s complexity, and taking the necessary time to work through foundational pieces without derailing the overall timeline. This proactive and business-led approach has positioned the company not only to meet its current growth but also to leverage its investments for future expansion and innovation within the SAP ecosystem. Looking ahead, KAB plans to expand its retail footprint with new permanent and pop-up locations across the U.S. Its vision is to integrate more unique business lines, such as baking school orders, into OMS+. “We want to make sure that OMS+ continues to help us service bakers needs across all of our innovative omnichannel experiences and shopping journeys in the future,” Wren concluded, affirming OMS+ as a core component of KAB’s long-term digital strategy.