Zespri Kiwifruit
Data management & data governance transform Zespri's global S/4 HANA processes
Background
As part of its next phase of growth, Zespri aspired to be a digital-first, future-led business. This journey begins with improving its existing data management and governance processes.
As a multinational organisation working with several suppliers and partners around the world, Zespri recognised the need to establish a trusted data platform and management system to drive business improvements — and in came the “Horizon Programme”, the first phase of its digital transformation journey.
Accelerating Zespri's Supply Chain Processes with Trusted Data
The company
Zespri International Limited is the largest marketer and distributor of kiwifruit worldwide. Known for its premium, fresh kiwifruits, Zespri sells to more than 59 countries and manages 30 percent of global volume. To do this, Zespri partners with 2,800 growers in New Zealand and 1,500 growers overseas, and is supported by a global team of 850 people spread across Mount Maunganui, Asia, Europe, and the Americas.
"Through the use of Syniti Knowledge Platform, the reporting and dashboarding that it provides makes the data verification experience for us much easier. The platform provides us with better visibility of data quality and how it is working for us. We are now able to work better with our data owners and champions across the business to drive improvements."
Project goals
Zespri uses SAP solutions such as S/4 HANA to handle all data and processes across their value chain, including sales and distribution, supply chain, planning, forecasting, and finance. However, internal teams lacked confidence in the company’s own data. This is largely driven by the reliance on outdated, legacy systems, which entailed manual, time-consuming data management through the use of spreadsheets. This ultimately resulted in levels of uncertainty in the accuracy of the data retrieved and processed from its systems.
The lack of trust in the company’s data strained decision-making within the business. This prompted Zespri to focus on developing a high standard of data governance and maintaining quality data at the core of its business to enable more timely and informed business decisions.
"Our digital transformation journey is still just beginning and there is much more to do. Together with Syniti we hope to continue to grow our data management partnership, make better decisions based on our trusted data, and in doing so, achieve our goal of becoming a digital-first, future-led business."
Why Syniti was Selected
Owing to its strong integrations with SAP, Zespri selected Syniti as its data transformation partner to kickstart its Horizon Programme. The implementation began with Zespri’s finance and supply chain business units, and aimed to drive change in how Zespri managed master data for two key areas across the business:
- Material Master – Data related to the fruit varieties, size, markets, characteristics, and packaging. This data impacts everything from shipping to sales orders and beyond.
- Business Partner Supplier – Data related to purchase orders and supplier payments. This data impacts the procurement and payment process.
Implementation Highlights
The process began with the implementation of Syniti’s data replication solution to facilitate the migration of data between ECC and SAP S/4 HANA. This entails two steps – firstly, a data reconciliation process to ensure that the target data matches the original source data in the migration, and secondly, a data scaffolding process to identify any missing data between the two systems.
Finally, using the platform, Syniti automated workflows by building a Supplier Onboarding Form, allowing Zespri to accelerate their supply chain process—which was previously reliant on manual and paper-based methods. Overall, Zespri was able to achieve massive operational efficiencies by transforming their data.
At the same time, the Syniti Knowledge Platform (SKP) was implemented to support the data scaffolding process. With a business-friendly, intuitive dashboard, Zespri was able to leverage the data validation capabilities of the platform to identify any failures, reasons for data mismatch, and subsequently take timely actions to ensure the smooth running of their complex supply chain process on S/4 HANA.
Furthermore, with in-built data quality rules, SKP helped to ensure strong and easy data governance for Zespri’s Material and Business Supplier Data. Now, all relevant business teams are able to access quality data, which was once only available to a limited group.