NZ Sugar gets $6m software upgrade

By ADAM GIFFORD

The need to keep business customers sweet by offering electronic interfaces has led New Zealand Sugar to install a JD Edwards OneWorld enterprise software system.

The $6 million upgrade - including hardware software and installation - is being done in conjunction with sister company Sugar Australia, with the sales, distribution and finance modules due to go live in April. Manufacturing modules should be installed by August.

NZ Sugar commercial manager John Ellis said the company's 15-year-old, Fortran-based internally built systems could not handle the shift to electronic business.

"They were good systems in their time, but it's difficult to get information out of them. They aren't flexible, they aren't integrated. So we've had to develop all these other systems around them, and there aren't many people around now who understand how to use them," Mr Ellis said.

"Many of our big retail and food and beverage customers want to talk electronically with our system so they can take cost from the supply chain, but we can't do that on the legacy system."

While NZ Sugar, with its Chelsea brand, is the largest supplier to the local market, that market has been deregulated since 1985 and it faces constant challenges from imports, including subsidised sugar from the European Union.

Its raw material, crystallised sugar-cane juice from Queensland, comes in by bulk cargo ship and is refined on Auckland's North Shore into a multitude of products.

NZ Sugar has turnover of $160 million from annual sugar sales, or more than 190,000 tonnes.

Mr Ellis said JD Edwards won the bid because OneWorld was the only system seen which was able to show that it could handle some key manufacturing, customer and supply chain processes.

Process manufacturing, where the end product is not just an assemblage of inputs, has always given software manufacturers a challenge.

"OneWorld also has a better look and feel than the other systems we were looking at," he said.

The system will run on an Oracle database on IBM RS/6000 Unix servers. Mr Ellis said the hardware choice "came down to negotiation. The RS/6000 was recommended as a better machine, more current in architecture, which gave us a pretty good expansion path."

The existing Digital Vax servers "will probably end up anchoring buoys off the wharf."

The system will be used by 135 concurrent users in 11 sites, including NZ Sugar's premises in Auckland and Christchurch.

It uses Windows Terminal Server and Citrix Metaframe to provide thin client access to a wide area network. The New Zealand and Australia systems will be linked by frame relay for support and redundancy capability.

"We considered using a single Australian data centre, but there was more advantage to the wider business through having separate but integrated technical infrastructures," Mr Ellis said.

JD Edwards is managing the technical architecture and configuration and Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu is providing application consulting and project management.

Sugar Australia general manager IT Jeff Seed, who is leading the project team, says the companies have changed some business processes so they can install the software without modification.

This will retain the integrity of the software's original design, make upgrades easier and lower long-term costs.