German software strengthens Fonterra's technology

By ADAM GIFFORD

Fonterra's relationship with German enterprise software vendor SAP is blossoming, and a joint team is looking at reorganising the dairy giant's order and inventory management processes.

SAP was selected as Fonterra's technology partner of choice in January after a hard-fought battle with Swedish vendor Intentia to provide a new supply chain planning system.

The prize was the chance to sell millions of dollars of software and services to the company as it gears up to increase its place in the global dairy market.

Marcel Van den Assum, chief information officer of Fonterra's NZMP milk processing business, said the division needed to replace its existing inventory and order management systems, which included software supplied by Oracle and a "home-baked" system called BOSS.

Work is well advanced on the supply chain planning pilot for NZMP's powder business, with a "proof of concept" implementation due to go live in August.

"We are now dealing with detailed process definitions, data cleansing, defining interfaces, key performance indicators, metrics and so on," he said.

Van den Assum said the software was also being tested to see how it worked in respect to cheese aging. Another IT project to shift all manufacturing sites to Oracle manufacturing applications was almost complete.

"The major change has been done at Whareroa [the former Kiwi plant at Hawera] but there is still two or three months' work left to complete all the modules," Van den Assum said.

For milk collection from the farm gate, the company would standardise the Aspire solution developed for Kiwi Dairies by Jade.

He said there was a "significant programme of work" involved - not just adding more functions to the software but renumbering farms and trucks to put them all on the one system.