The industrial processing of fruit and vegetables is a major market. With a global network of suppliers and cultivators, SVZ is one of the larger players in this segment. SVZ is active in the business-to-business segment, and supplies its products to the international food industry.
“Controlling the quality in the agrarian supply chain and the production processes is of vital importance. Information processing plays an important part in this,” says Ton Blok, Corporate Manager IT for SVZ. “One of the answers to this is continuously innovating with IT solutions such as offered by SAP.”
The range varies from strawberry purée to spinach purée, and from carrot concentrate to lychee concentrate. The company was founded in 1867, and has grown considerably since then. By now, it has five international branches, but products from all over the world are processed by the company. In 2015, SVZ achieved a turnover of 170 million euro. The company is part of Royal Cosun, the parent company of, among other companies, Aviko and Suikerunie.
One ERP system
To gain insight into all business processes, the multinational has invested in a SAP ERP system provided by Goldfish-ICT. The decision to work with these companies was already made in 2007. In 2006, the different departments of the company were still working with different software. Ton describes this as “a fractured landscape.” According to the Corporate Manager IT, standardisation and integration of the processes was practically impossible at that stage. “Goldfish-ICT has excellently helped us to transform SVZ from an organisation working with fragmented, heterogeneous systems to an organisation with a standard, SAP, and standard method of working central to the company.”
Due to the years of working together, the choice of Goldfish-ICT for the implementation was obvious. “Goldfish-ICT knows our organisation like the back of their hand, that is why the cooperation is successful,” Ton agrees. “That is why we wanted a further implementation of SAP within our own organisation, in Belgium (Epicor) and the US (Exact), to be executed in cooperation with consultants from Goldfish-ICT.”
Local differences
The implementation of the new system within all departments of the company resulted in a number of benefits for SVZ. For example, they are working according to international standards, and the packages are equipped to meet local, fiscal legislature. “With that, we also have optimum control over the quality of our products,” Ton explains. “From the crop in the field to the end product of our customers. Think of baby food, for instance.”
Ton resolutely dismisses criticism that is sometimes expressed about SAP. “I fight the prejudice that SAP is too complex. Many companies that switch to SAP do not first critically look at their own processes, and want to adapt SAP to their processes. But SAP is optimally used when you streamline processes with the ‘best practices.’ This last thing was therefore important for us before the implementation to our branches abroad. We were able to manage the other procedure using SAP mostly from within our own organisation.”
The new software should also allow the company to manage challenges in future. The computerisation continues. “The right answer to this can particularly be given by continuing to innovate, technology-wise,” Ton concludes. “For this, you should think of, for example, precision farming and integrating agronomical processes. It might sound like music from the future, but in some parts of the world it is already happening. We are personally researching these possibilities to improve our position in the ‘upstream supply chain’ and to integrate with our SAP quality system. The developments are occurring quickly, and we need technology partners such as Goldfish-ICT and SAP to catch us up on all of that.”