Published on the 17/11/2022 | Written by Heather Wright
Eyes new horizons for people, processes and growers…
Zespri has gone live with S/4HANA Cloud private edition – the first phase of its $160 million Horizon transformation project designed to standardise and automate the Kiwifruit co-op’s processes, increase operational efficiency and provide a platform for growth and innovation.
The first tranche of the project, which kicked off in 2020 with Deloitte as the design and implementation partner leading a Kiwi-based consortium including Zag (now part of Deloitte competitor Accenture) and Sysdoc, was due to go live in August but delayed by three months.
“We underinvested for many years. We had to change.”
In announcing the delay back in July, Zespri chairman Bruce Cameron said the deferral provided the time needed to execute the ‘final, crucial phase well’.
It went live on November 1st.
Zespri says the implementation should enable it to deliver kiwifruit to customers more effectively, with a more robust, transparent and reliable process supporting its entire product delivery system from receipt of a sales order to payments and distribution.
Proof that the product has been grown and handled in accordance with regulatory, customer specifications and consumer expectations will also be included.
Zespri’s SAP environment was previously hosted on Microsoft Azure public cloud in what was hailed in 2014 as the world’s largest production SAP migration to Azure.
Dave Scullin, Zespri chief digital officer, says: “We’ve known for a long time that our legacy systems were no longer scalable and fit for purpose.
“We underinvested in them for many years, to a point where they would hold us back, reduce our efficiency and effectiveness and create real risk for the business. We had to change.”
The implementation also includes SAP Integrated Business Planning to provide a more efficient end to end demand and supply planning capability. Zespri will also harness SAP Business Technology Platform capabilities, including Analytics Cloud to help turn data into intelligence, Integration Suite, the SAP Extension Suite and SAP-endorsed partner solutions from OpenText, Tricentis and Celonis.
The tranche one solutions stretch across the value chain and create a consistent approach to purchasing across Zespri, with better visibility of spend and costs, Zespri has said.
The project will streamline and strengthen Zespri’s planning, budgeting and forecasting abilities and enable financial and planning data to be accessed from a single place, enabling a consistent, global way of working and more collaborative planning and proactive decision making.
“We’ve selected the latest generation SAP applications as our core enterprise platform, but to view this simply as a digital project would be wrong,” Scullin says.
“The Horizon Programme aims for transformational change, supporting a truly integrated end-to-end business.”
The programme is Zespri’s largest ever digital transformation, modernising legacy systems set up for a much smaller industry.
It had invested $72.6 million in the programme to 31 March 2022, with a restatement of $42.3 million of SaaS spend.
Almost 1,000 full time employees and contractors across offices in 17 countries are expected to benefit from the implementation which will help create global consistency, Zespri says.
The company is undertaking its biggest-ever training programme on the back of the implementation.
SAP says its Delivery Framework was used to deliver the project, supporting partners with the initial design, technology safeguarding and go-live support.
Paul Marriott, SAP Asia Pacific Japan president, says Zespri is one of SAP’s ‘most forward-looking customers’, noting their ‘ambitious and proactive way of embracing business transformation’.
Future developments are focused on grower enablement and solutions for extended supply chain and quality management, integrated business planning and sales.
