Standardisation ensures transparency, efficiency and easier compliance
When sustainability is central to your strategy, transparency in your supply chain is indispensable. This is impossible without an IT system that ensures traceability from the local grower to sales. Nedspice can talk about that. With the help of SAP partner NTT DATA Business Solutions Benelux, it replaced an ‘Excel-heavy’ way of working with a standardised SAP environment based on SAP S/4HANA.
Nedspice is a global and sustainable producer of herbs, spices and dried vegetables. Its business activities include sourcing, cleaning, sterilization, grinding, packing and distribution of single spices, herbs and dehydrated vegetables. Nedspice is headquartered in the Netherlands and operates processing facilities in India and Vietnam. Sales offices, warehouses and distribution facilities are located in the Netherlands, India, Vietnam, the United States of America, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and China.
Sustainability is a crucial core value for Nedspice throughout its operations. For instance, it has been supporting local farmers in Vietnam and India in environmentally friendly cultivation and sustainable livelihoods since 2013. The company is also involved in Sustainable Spices Initiative that works to make the sector more sustainable. Recently, Nedspice opened an eco-friendly onion drying plant at Mahuva in India.
Fragmented environment
Transparency and direct insight into all processes of all production, sales and warehouse locations; this was not possible with Nedspice’s old IT system. In addition, the various branches each had their own processes and master data. This made analyses across locations very difficult. These different systems also made it a challenge to guarantee the quality and sustainability of the products worldwide.
“Where sales and administration might still have been recordable well enough with the old software, in too many places more and more Excel sheets were tied together to create the required functionality. This was no longer sustainable,” says Jos van Gulick, general director Vietnam at Nedspice.
Standardisation on SAP
The company put an end to that situation by switching to a standardised SAP environment. This consists of SAP S/4HANA and it.agriculture accelerator, SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP Transportation Management and a scanning solution.
This standardisation soon bore fruit. All branches now work according to the same processes via one integrated system, with a ‘single source of truth’ for all company data. This gives the company more control over quality processes and better insight into their progress.
In addition, Nedspice now also has the ability to analyse data from all international production, warehousing, and sales locations. Among other things, it does so to gain direct insight into profitability and its current international position.
The right insight
According to Van Gulick, that insight is crucial. “In our market, raw material prices can fluctuate a lot. If you don’t have the right insight immediately – a few working days later, for example – you quickly run a financial risk. With this new system, we make all data transparent and that is hugely valuable. We can make the right decisions at the right time.”
Nedspice also benefits from substantial time and cost savings. By linking the SAP environment to a scanning solution, data entry at order picking is more efficient and less error-prone. Finally, the company benefits from full traceability of raw materials and products from farm to distribution. This makes complying with changing laws and regulations in the sector much easier.