Nature One Dairy nurtures organic growth with SAP
Customer:
Nature One DairyChallenge:
- Expand infant formula sales to China, Indonesia, Singapore and other regional markets
- Digitise and automate time consuming and error-prone manual stock-control processes
- Integrate inventory, production and accounting systems for more efficient product tracking and billing
Solution:
- End-to-end solution integrating SAP SMB Solutions with warehouse and package code management systems
- Tablets for live feeds and direct data entry into the SAP Business One version for HANA database
- Handheld scanners for tracking raw materials and finished products
Results:
- Streamlined, integrated and transparent business processes, with consolidated warehouse, production and accounting systems
- More accurate inventory and quality control, with traceability from raw materials to finished product
- Higher efficiency, less production downtime, significant staff time savings, and the ability to better meet customers’ requirements and delivery dates
Nature One Dairy is an Australian-owned blending and canning manufacturer dedicated to producing high-quality, specialty powdered milk products from grass-fed Australian cows. After experiencing rapid growth in its own country, the company decided to market to nearby Asia, where safe, affordable infant formula is in high demand but difficult to find.
Challenge
As it expanded its business, Nature One Dairy realised the time had come to modernise to more automated, integrated and efficient processes. The company was still relying on a combination of traditional quality assurance practices, separate accounting and production systems, and considerable manual effort.
The most pressing issue was improving the ease and accuracy of stock control to trace the raw materials used in the powdered milk products, since in addition to the base powder, the finished product contains vitamins and other ingredients from a variety of suppliers.
Manually tracking the goods as they moved around the plant was time consuming and prone to human error. As materials arrived in the warehouse from suppliers, workers logged the information on paper and later input it into an Excel database. Allocating goods into production and then reconciling them with the finished products was also arduous.
Solution
The ideal solution would coordinate the interaction of as many as 15 suppliers and integrate the four essential parts of the business: raw materials, accounting, production and final product count.
Nature One Dairy spent about six months exploring various warehousing, accounting and other options before deciding that an end-to-end SAP SMB solution, based on SAP Business One for HANA would best meet its requirements.
The company chose DXC Oxygen, part of the DXC Technology global SAP team and the leading specialist SAP solutions provider across Australia and New Zealand, to deliver and customise the solution because of its considerable experience.
DXC Oxygen helped integrate SAP Business One with Nature One Dairy’s Warehouse Management System.
The team automated processes so that once raw materials arrive, employees can scan goods into a receipt purchase order in the SAP Business One for HANA system using a handheld scanner. Workers prepare orders for allocation and then release goods to production using a tablet that connects to SAP. Those tablets are also used to enter production information to the system while walking around on the production floor.
Results
The new system repurposed Android tablets to record the many production import points and provide live feeds and direct data entry into the SAP database. They’ve been a hit with employees.
If there are issues with materials, the SAP system can keep the product on lock, and it won’t leave the warehouse until the QA team has released it. On the accounting side, back-office processing and invoicing functions are incorporated into SAP, so DXC Oxygen was able to correlate the release of finished goods with the receipt of funds.
The ability to handle raw materials electronically rather than manually has resulted in streamlined processes, tight inventory control and rapid production response times. The company now has a transparency it didn’t have before, with known lead times for raw materials and production.
Production and quality team members in any part of the world, including Shanghai and Singapore, can enter the system on any given day and see what raw materials are first in and first out, what’s been used, what’s on hand and the quantity of finished goods.
The company has been able to combine four different parts of the business — raw materials receiving/scanning, accounting, warehousing and production recording — into one system so they work together to give us a final product and a final count, which they couldn’t do previously.
Read the full success story.