Smaken av Grimstad Moves ERP to the Infor Cloud in Eight Weeks

Infor, the industry cloud company announced that Smaken av Grimstad AS, Norway’s leading provider of canned and preserved fresh produce, has gone live with Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage in eight weeks. Infor’s powerful, cloud-native, industry-focused enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution will deliver insights from across the supply chain, underpinning future business growth. The project was managed by Infor alliance partner Columbus.

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Smaken av Grimstad had last upgraded its on-premises ERP system in 2018 and was using the incumbent solution across the business to manage everything from purchasing raw materials, inventory and production planning to sales, invoicing and accounting. The business felt it was being held back by its ERP system and wanted to have a more agile evergreen ERP and ability to consume new technology as a cloud service. So, the business decided to implement Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage, powered by AWS (Amazon Web Services).

Smaken av Grimstad was keen to make the move to the cloud, but it needed to be ready before the harvest. The team at Columbus worked hard to achieve this and after just eight weeks, the ERP move to the cloud was completed.

“When the board made the decision to lift the ERP solution to the cloud, there were barely two months until the harvest in July,” explains Jan Rommetveit, managing director and co-owner of Smaken av Grimstad. “The cucumbers are ripe and ready for harvesting around mid-July. A few days later, they start to rot. The factory must be equipped with people and systems, prepared to receive and process the raw materials when they are harvested. To ensure timely deliveries to the customers and liquidity in the business, order fulfilment and invoicing had to be up and running in time.

“The warehouse also needed the ability to scan the pallets on delivery of the goods so that we can send electronic information about the goods deliveries to customers. Without this in place, our customers would have to do this manually, an exercise that our large food wholesale customers Norgesgruppen, Rema and Coop simply would not accept,” Rommetveit continued.

“Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage safeguards our historic farm-to-table perspective for the entire food supply chain by enabling us to obtain insights from right across the supply chain. At the same time, we know that the solution is constantly being enriched with industry-specific functionality, which gives us confidence that we have a future-oriented platform that will be relevant at all times for our business. Moreover, this has not cost us more than a usable tractor and shows that modern ERP platforms are now available for SMEs like us,” Rommetveit concluded.

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“This was very much a team effort,” said Per Christian Øen, customer manager at Columbus. “It wasn’t ‘us and them,’ but ‘we’ all the way. Many people were involved in the project, but the combination of accurate resource allocation, data migration with good assurance of quality and time, the right expertise and, not least, professional project management and an agile project approach with close dialogue with the teams, contributed to landing this project on time and on budget.”

“With Infor CloudSuite Food and Beverage, Smaken av Grimstad has invested in a solution for the long term,” said Marcel Koks, Infor food industry strategy leader. “Our industry-specific functionality helps manufacturers increase visibility right across the supply chain, delivering the valuable insight needed to help reduce costs and increase efficiency, all while boosting business agility. It’s a testament to the hard work of the teams involved that we were able to achieve a successful implementation in just eight weeks.”