“Thanks to Sciante we had a strong case to our supplier”
Breeding vegetables
Enza Zaden is a vegetable breeding company. The company develops vegetable varieties and produces and sells seeds across the globe. At the main office in Enkhuizen Enza employs about 850 people, Enza has several offices worldwide with 5 to 200 employees each. To support its digital processes Enza Zaden uses a industry specific ERP system called ABS. When interruptions of service persisted, that caused problems for all employees, CIO Peter Baer decided to get outside help. After consulting his network he got the tip to get in touch with Sciante.
Peter Baer: “Sciante's Hugo Van den Berg was convincing during our first meeting and displayed his knowledge on the subject. He proposed a detailed investigation of all digital proceses in the entire chain, including the adjacent systems, to pull up the proverbial net. He made a list of expected problems up front and at least 80% of those turned out to be applicable to our situation.”
We couldn't immediately measure the exact performance impact of the issues found. And it wasn't possible to just fix everything directly. Based on Sciante's advice additional tests were performed. Based on the results a plan of action was proposed that allowed many of the problems to be solved. It turned out that a large part of the disruptions could be traced to the software written by the supplier of the ERP system. Sciante's report allowed us to prove to them exactly which bottlenecks were present. For them important information to incorporate in the new release of their product. That release will give Enza an even bigger performance improvement.
Baer: “So we still don't have an ERP system that works optimally. That will follow with the new release of ABS. Thanks to Sciante we had a strong case towards our supplier, who immediately confirmed that by the way. We do notice a big difference after the improvements applied by Sciante though. The response times of Citrix and servers have improved greatly for example. Small things that you do often, like printing invoices, are so much faster now. We are quite content with the services delivered by Sciante and employ their services on a regular basis to help us with performance issues.”
Time is money
When you're breeding vegetables and selling and producing seeds, time is a valuable commodity. Sciante helped Enza Zaden to benefit from a more effective use of time, as much as currently possible.
Peter Baer was interviewed in January of 2020.