King Salmon goes to Intentia

By ADAM GIFFORD

New Zealand King Salmon has chosen an enterprise software system from Swedish firm Intentia to bring some order to its growing business.

The 50-licence sale shows Intentia coming back into contention in a slow ERP (enterprise resource planning) market. Most of the major New Zealand sales in the past year have gone to American firm J. D. Edwards, which was also considered along with SAP and SSA.

Bryce Gilchrist, New Zealand King Salmon general manager of finance and corporate services, said the main purpose of the Movex system, which runs on an IBM AS/400 server nicknamed "Doris," was to deal with the problem of integrating information efficiently.

"We have three production facilities in Nelson, four farms in Queen Charlotte Sound and another in Pelorus Sound, an aquaculture husbandry unit in Picton, hatcheries in Christchurch and Takaka and a research and development facility at Kaituna, near Blenheim.

"That means management has been fragmented and we don't have information being delivered in an effective manner."

So far the business, which has a turnover of $50 million and 340 staff, has been run on Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and Access databases.

Mr Gilchrist said that as a fully integrated business that does everything from selecting the breeding lines to marketing the result, New Zealand King Salmon needed a large volume of data to drive its planning.

"We want to push more products through the value-add cycle, branding as much of it as possible. We want to lift the percentage of branded product we sell into the export market."

More than half the company's product goes to Japan, where the species it grows, the large Chinook salmon, is more sought after than the more commonly farmed Atlantic salmon.

Mr Gilchrist said the first priority when choosing a system was one that could handle the company's marketing and distribution needs.

"Next most important was finding a package that would best fit the processes flow environment and the aquaculture husbandry."

That means being able to handle the long production cycle - designed to deliver a 2-year-old, 3.5kg fish every month of the year - as well as process the fresh product and get it on a plane within a day.

While most enterprise software products could handle discrete manufacturing, Movex was able to handle process flow better than some of its competitors - the "exploding fish" problem. Good yield management means it uses about 70 per cent of each fish.

The company produces about 4800 tonnes of salmon a year, and with existing licences could expand to 10,000 tonnes.

Frame relay will be used to link the sites.

The implementation involves four Intentia consultants and five "process owners" from New Zealand King Salmon.

Mr Gilchrist said the Movex system would give the company the ability to phase in online sales, once the backend processes are in place.

New Zealand King Salmon is 100 per cent owned by the Tiong Group.

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