A 140 year-old farmer-owned co-operative with headquarters in New Zealand, Fonterra is the world’s leading milk processor and dairy exporter. With a team of over 16,000 working across the dairy spectrum – from advising farmers on sustainable farming and milk production, to ensuring that Fonterra continues to meet exacting quality standards and delivers dairy nutrition every day in more than 100 countries around the world – Fonterra’s business is based on sourcing secure, high quality milk and unlocking its natural goodness in ways that add real value to customers and consumers.
Fonterra ANZ first implemented our recipe developer system in 2007 to centralise data and be a single source of truth for bills of materials and nutrition and intolerance information for Fonterra dairy products. Recently Fonterra took the decision to enhance the use of Recipes & Specifications across its Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) business units and to fully integrate it with their SAP software system.
“We needed a system that could deliver the capabilities and flexibility to support our business strategy,” explained Ryan Smith, Fonterra ANZ’s Recipes & Specifications Administrator. “One objective was to maintain our central information repository. Our various business units tended to store data locally which meant by moving to centralised information on an ANZ group-wide basis, we have total confidence that the centralised data repository contains the latest available information.”
Simultaneously with the implementation of SAP, Fonterra ANZ explored the opportunities for implementing Recipe Developer in a more powerful way. “We were very familiar with FoodChain ID’s Recipe Developer system: it was powerful, flexible and a single ‘Source of Truth’. Reporting was a major requirement: SAP may be good at reporting; Recipe Developer is excellent!” continued Ryan Smith.
Based on over twenty years’ experience working with major customers in the food and beverage industry, Recipes and Specifications is the culmination of longterm collaborative development between food industry and IT experts and is regarded as being the most powerful system in the world for developing recipes and optimising formulations.
“Every area of the food industry has different requirements and it is important that Recipe Developer can be configured in a way that precisely meets our clients’ requirements – both for today and for the future,” explained Daniel Twigden, FoodChain ID’s project manager for Fonterra ANZ.
“One of the major reasons why organisations of all sizes throughout the world select our solution of choice is its flexibility. As well as automatically monitoring recipes against pre-defined specifications and project briefs, Recipe Developer includes a powerful optimisation functionality to enable recipes to be automatically generated to fit a complete nutritional profile in one quick and easy operation, and allows companies to respond to food industry issues quickly and effectively.”
Confident that the combination of the Recipes & Specifications and SAP would meet business requirements and support future growth, Fonterra ANZ began an in-depth review of the features and facilities delivered by the latest version of Recipe Developer. “We were very impressed with the capabilities of the latest release,” commented Ryan Smith. “Within a very short space of time we realised that here was a solution that would support our growth, streamline recipe management at all levels across the organisation, and allow us to produce a wide range of standard and one-off reports, safe in the knowledge that we are working with highly accurate and up-to-date information.”
Working in close cooperation with Fonterra ANZ’s highly capable IT team, FoodChain ID consultants and developers began the process of configuring Recipe Developer and developing the seamless interface to the new SAP system. “We set up a shared test and development site so that both IT teams could ensure that we had a fully functioning solution when we went live,” explained Ryan Smith. “Once we were satisfied that we had a robust system, FoodChain ID began to validate and consolidate our existing data before migrating it across and subsequently continued the testing phase with live data.”
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Over the course of four months, Fonterra ANZ rolled out the new solution, running it side-by-side with the existing system. During this time, we provided training and knowledge-share expertise to key Fonterra stakeholders,
ensuring that the internal IT team would be able to maintain, enhance and further customise Recipe Developer and assist system users to become familiar with the solution’s new features and capabilities.
Fonterra ANZ is now moving its other business units over to the latest version of Recipe Developer – a process that is expected to be concluded towards the latter half of this year (2013). The entire process has, reports Ryan Smith, been smooth with issues quickly resolved. “I am certain that one of the reasons for the smooth go-live was the amount of work that FoodChain ID and our internal IT team undertook in the early stages of the project,” he commented. “By thoroughly testing the solution with real data, we were able to resolve issues and further enhance the system so that it precisely met our requirements.“
Already, Fonterra ANZ is reaping the benefits of the new Recipe Developer and SAP solution. With all information now being held in a central data repository, Fonterra are now able to generate reports, analyse data and respond to market trends far more quickly and efficiently.
“We are well on our way to achieving a single, trusted source of product information, which in turn will allow us to generate meaningful reports efficiently and closely monitor the day-to-day operation of our business,” concluded Ryan Smith. “Our implementation of a remote desktop solution means that we can access the information that we need at any time and from any Fonterra ANZ site location. We have achieved this without major disruption, thanks to the FoodChain ID team, who continue to work closely with us.”
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Best of breed solution delivers the management, monitoring and reporting capabilities needed to ensure continued growth
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FoodChain ID’s knowledge and expertise ensures tight integration with SAP
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Rigorous testing and enhancement during test and development phases results in comprehensive, easy-to-use and powerful solution
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Rapid, side-by-side comparison of multiple recipe variations, enabling the best-fit recipe to be chosen
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Powerful optimisation functionality allows recipes to be automatically generated to fit a complete nutritional profile in one quick and easy operation, at minimum cost
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Solution allows for legislative, formatting, and language requirements for any market, including standards for allergenic and cross-contamination labelling, nutritional, RDI, and ingredient declarations
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Permits Fonterra ANZ to respond to food industry trends quickly and effectively, and be pro-active with major customers and business partners
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Flexibility ensures that Recipe Developer can be reconfigured to meet evolving business requirements.
Recipes & Specifications Administrator,
Fonterra Group
We were very impressed with the capabilities of the latest release,. Within a very short space of time we realised that here was a solution that would support our growth, streamline recipe management at all levels across the organisation, and allow us to produce a
wide range of standard and one-off reports, safe in the knowledge that we are working with highly accurate and up -to-date information.