Yet again the theme of ruthless standardisation has come through strongly in interviewing some of SAP's biggest customers here at Sapphire.

Kraft Foods is one of the very biggest – 12,000 users in Europe, 30,000 more in North America by 2010, Asia Pacific to follow later, and with the software in use since 2001.

Kraft used to have disparate systems in every country in Europe, but was very much an early mover in adopting a single, standard, unmodified version of SAP across the continent.

One of the great benefits of this was realised in October last year. The firm wanted to upgrade to the latest release of SAP to take advantage of new functionality. For most companies, the prospect of a major version upgrade to 12,000 users in many countries would make them shudder. The cost and complexity of such a project is what has historically kept too many organisation stuck on older versions of applications, with a system update taking on all the characteristics of a total re-implementation.

But for Kraft, the decision to standardise paid off – the entire upgraded system was built remotely, offsite, and implemented in just three months.

To add to the achievement, the food giant also chose to change its whole IT infrastructure at the same time – and completed that in the same three month period, working with outsourcer EDS and key supplier IBM.

Kraft senior director, SAP competency centres, Jan Ziskasen, is so laid back now about his standard implementation blueprint for SAP that he was able to be in Berlin this week despite a major part of the US project about to go live this weekend.

How many IT directors would be confident enough in an impending deadline to be happily thousands of miles away on another continent?