KEY POINTS:
Even a humble fertiliser business needs cutting-edge technology to improve its business processes in this era of enhanced worker productivity, improved supply chain processes and better-managed customer relationships.
In a deal announced today, rural sector mainstay Ballance Agri-Nutrients, which has its headquarters in Mt Maunganui, has signed up with SAP to replace its ageing IT systems with a suite of products from the business software giant.
A statement about Ballance's decision to buy the enterprise resource planning, supply-chain management and customer relationship management package from SAP has the expected focus on the productivity benefits of the new software.
"Our focus is on providing excellent service to our customers, and SAP will enable us to enhance our existing offering and improve our efficiencies," Ballance's corporate services general manager, Elizabeth Harper, says in the statement.
SAP New Zealand managing director Ian Black's contribution to the press release is perhaps a little less predictable. Black says the company's technology "enables collaboration across business networks".
He says SAP now has a cluster of corporate clients in the agricultural and rural services sector, including RD1, Gallagher Group, Livestock Improvement, Dexcel (now partof DairyNZ) and DuPont.
When I phoned to ask Black how New Zealand rural businesses were benefiting through collaboration on a shared software platform, appropriately enough he called back from his rural home in Hawkes Bay.
Black is a poster boy for the new generation of highly mobile executives intent on balancing their work commitments with lifestyle. He typically spends a day a week working from his property near the Tuki Tuki River and the other four days based out of SAP's Auckland and Wellington offices.
So why is British-born Black, a one-time London accountant, plugging rural business networks?
"Business network transformation," he explains, is a concept gaining favour with SAP clients around the world.
"There are always efficiencies to be gained through internal processes, that's what ERPs [the grunty enterprise resource planning software at the heart of most corporate IT systems] have targeted in the past, but collaboration, trading, supply-chain transparency etc are where the next opportunities for value generation are. With our customer base growing we're starting to see customers joining the dots and working together to improve outcomes for their mutual end customers."
A simple example might be a retailer swapping data with a product manufacturer so the manufacturer could see, in real time, what supplies were left on the retailer's shelves, while the retailer could see what stock the manufacturer had available in the warehouse.
Using technology to effectively tap into the manufacturing, distribution and logistics networks of business partners around the world is a way of overcoming New Zealand's geographic isolation from our trading partners, Black says.
My journey of heartland business technology enlightenment continued with a call to Gallagher Group's global headquarters in Hamilton.
The iconic Kiwi exporter's group supply chain manager, Brent Dawson, said retailer RD1, a large Gallagher customer, had recently switched on an SAP system, meaning there were opportunities for the two businesses to easily establish an electronic data interchange (EDI) connection to automate order processing.
Meanwhile, with China a growing part of Gallagher's manufacturing business, Dawson says the company has used its IT resources to develop a "virtual warehouse" to keep tabs on inbound and outbound inventory that is in the hands of suppliers and sub-contractors based in the republic.
