Our client, a US-based leading agricultural cooperative that has been in business for nearly 100 years, produces fruit juices as well as fresh and dried fruits with hundreds of member growers across North America and South America.
As they have become one of North America’s best-selling juice brands, they needed a technology partner that could supercharge operational agility, improve supply chain and product analytics and contribute to business growth.
The Challenge
Acquiring new customers and keeping existing customers
To maintain optimum and competitive pricing, our client continuously analyses product supply and demand. To meet market demand, the company needs 360-degree visibility into the production rates, capacity and business methods of its vast network of member growers and production facilities.
The cooperative’s legacy IT landscapes, manual business processes and aging technologies made for lackluster data monitoring and operational efficiency and resulted in subpar insights into member growers and production facilities. Growing competition necessitated a sharper focus on grower satisfaction, so the company sought improvements in continuous innovation, data consistency and agile delivery. The cooperative also grappled with legacy IT operation-related challenges such as:
- End-of-life network, server and storage devices
- End-user machine management
- Outdated collaboration tools
- Undefined patch and vulnerability management devices
- A lack of data recovery environment setup and back-up restoration devices
The Objective
Develop a robust IT landscape to accelerate time to market and improve reporting accuracy
The client wanted to collaborate with an IT partner with a good mix of technical competence and experience that could use the latest technological solutions to drive innovation and automation while limiting costs.
Seamless integration of enterprise-wide IT applications would reduce sync time and provide accurate reports to management. A master data system/solution would act as a system of record to reduce data redundancy and duplication.
Like any other business, the client’s fundamental objective was to increase sales in a stable, sustainable way.
To accomplish this goal, the company’s imperatives were to increase product variety, maintain high quality across all products and expedite production. To achieve these imperatives, they were ready to explore the untapped potential of digital transformation and application modernization. They partnered with HCLTech to supercharge the business via innovation, scalability, grower satisfaction, customer loyalty and stable growth.
The Solution
IT systems modernization and automation-driven product analytics
HCLTech proposed a solution that included an IT systems and technology upgrade and automation-driven product analytics and reporting. The solution would eliminate errors inherent in the company’s existing manual data sourcing and data cleansing methods.
HCLTech modernized the legacy systems and hardware with a phased series of upgrades and patch management. The team migrated key applications to the cloud and increased IT systems reliability via a lift-and-shift strategy. To further transform the company’s IT landscape and systematize disparate data systems, HCLTech helped with the following:
- Patching end-user devices mapped with Windows 11 version 21H2 and 22H2
- Implementing Azure Update Manager for server patching
- Reducing legacy footprints via a tech refresh project
- Setting up a Tier 0 environment
- Conducting an active directory assessment and implementing recommendations by the CoE team
- Multiple improvements in SCCM for end-user computing devices
- Threat advisories for infrastructure vulnerabilities
- Creating multiple dashboards in the ITSM tool for compliance and SLA performance reporting
- Upgrading firmware for network and computer systems
- Leveraging HCLTech’s Test CoE to deliver testing methodologies
- Engaging HCLTech enterprise architects to drive app rationalization
- Deploying ETL tools for data cleanup exercises
- Structured and unified pricing rationalization data on a single platform maintained on SAP and o9
The Impact
A supercharged business via innovation, scalability, grower satisfaction, customer loyalty and stable growth
Collaborating with the client’s IT and business teams, HCLTech delivered the solution right the first time and without service disruptions. Our active role in the client’s transformation journey enabled the cooperative to:
- Reduce its payment cycle time to member growers and give growers visibility into their deliverables and payments, all of which has increased grower satisfaction and retention
- Leverage accurate reporting and dashboarding for multiple business streams to analyze data, accurately forecast demand, accelerate time to market and establish competitive pricing to beat the competition
- Refactor and integrate master data and its attributes to enhance data quality
- Significantly reduce vulnerabilities in end-user computing devices and the compute environment through business process automation
- Enhance performance by upgrading firmware versions of compute devices
The technology transformation rewarded the company with improved visibility into product mix, tighter supply chain management, greater control over production and quality and supercharged efficiency — all of which have led to the cooperative increasing sales in a stable, sustainable way.
