New Zealand’s Zespri is one of the first organizations that embraced SAP’s Business Transformation as a Service offering RISE with SAP shortly after it was launched in 2021 to support its enterprise cloud strategy.
Zespri International Limited, one of the world’s most successful horticultural marketing companies and NZ’s largest horticultural exporter, implemented the first tranche of its $160 million, multi-year SAP-based Horizon program. The SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition– a key part of the RISE with SAP offering– go-live officially kicked off on November 1 after three months of deferral.
“We’ve selected the latest generation SAP applications as our core enterprise platform, but to view this simply as a digital project would be wrong,” Dave Scullin, Zespri’s chief digital officer, stated. “The Horizon Programme aims for transformational change, supporting a truly integrated end-to-end business.”
Commenting on SAP’s innovation partnership with New Zealand’s cooperative of growers, Paul Marriott, president of SAP Asia Pacific/Japan, said:
“We’ve been working with Zespri for many years, and I look forward to the next phase of our journey, as Zespri continues to grow, deliver, and delight customers, while also sustaining returns to the industry and growers.”
Marriott also highlighted that the world-renowned kiwifruit distributor is one of the German tech mammoth’s future-oriented clients that are now realizing the benefits of deploying the BTaaS platform RISE with SAP across its enterprise operations.
Advancing the Enterprise Cloud Strategy with SAP
The first phase of the four-year digital transformation program is centered on modernizing legacy systems to streamline processes to drive operational efficiencies and support growth and innovation.
“We’ve known for a long time that our legacy systems were no longer scalable and fit for purpose,” said Scullin. “We underinvested in them for many years, to a point where they would hold us back, reduce our efficiency and effectiveness, and create real risk for the business. We had to change.”
Aside from the move to SAP S/4HANA Cloud, private edition, Zespri’s enterprise cloud strategy harnesses several cloud solutions from the software giant such as:
- SAP Integrated Business Planning (IBP)
- SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP)
- SAP Analytics Cloud
- SAP Integration Suite
- SAP Extension Suite
- SAP Fiori
- SAP Delivery Framework
- SAP-endorsed partner solutions from OpenText, Tricentis, and Celonis
Zespri intends to leverage SAP IBP to deliver a holistic demand and supply planning capability while the SAP Analytics Cloud platform is anticipated to provide business intelligence tools including best-in-class data visualizations and dashboarding to help the co-op make better data-driven decisions. In addition, Fiori applications will further help the organization turn data into intelligence by providing real-time operational reporting to boost business performance as well as mitigate risk.
Furthermore, leveraging SAP’s Cloud Success Services delivered by Deloitte and Accenture, Zespri will also be harnessing the SAP Delivery Framework to help streamline the move to SAP S/4HANA on partner-led projects, establish premium engagements service with a focus on mitigating the technology risk, and go-live support.
The Kiwi organization sees the enterprise cloud strategy with SAP to deliver a more transparent, reliable product delivery system and to provide global consistency to its largest training program yet involving about 1,000 full-time employees and contractors across 17 countries. While the new systems are pegged to run in SAP’s private cloud, Zespri’s partnership with Microsoft remains as it continues to use Azure for its enterprise infrastructure.
