“Sancore” at Sanford. Digital transformation through Microsoft D365 Finance & Operations.

From Albert Sanford starting his own Auckland fishing business in 1864, to 225 aquaculture farms, 43 vessels, 16 sites nationwide and about 1400 people today, Sanford is New Zealand’s oldest and largest fishing company. But don’t let the company’s age fool you. Sanford puts modern technology, innovation and sustainability first to make sure their position as seafood industry leaders will remain for at least another 150 years.

June saw Sanford go Live with the biggest system change they have seen as a business. The scope of the change has been to implement Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) Innova into 4 seafood processing sites and 12 Deep Sea vessels and enterprise-wide Microsoft D365 F & O to the NZ and Australian businesses including multiple inventory holding locations and several toll manufacturing sites.

The project was originally scoped in 2019 and had to contend with design requirements and early build and integrations being completed during the Covid “lockdown” periods. From a Supply Chain perspective, the project was complex given the range of vertically integrated value chains that exist in the business and the need to ensure a high bar in traceability due to regulatory requirements across the seafood sector. There was also a requirement to improve the visibility of products in transit and integrate with customers and logistics services suppliers. Accurate product costing, given the nature of primary production and dis-aggregation of seafood and the cost to serve, were also requirements. D365 was seen as a platform on which the business could grow into the future and add additional functionality once the core was embedded. Other areas to be further explored include Integrated Business Planning (IBP) and Asset Management.

Some of the key learnings to come from the project have been the need for strong program infrastructure (ways of working, project management tools, resources) as well as strong governance and project management leadership. Having Executive sponsorship and Board support is key to alignment on project objectives and priorities once the scope is confirmed, as there will always be choices to be made once the project starts and assumptions around resource and cost are tested. It was important for Sanford to complete a capability and capacity review of its resources and where different and additional skill sets were identified, they were brought into the project. The project has delivered growth in people’s capabilities as they have had to find new ways of working across a fully integrated system and build more technical knowledge.

The D365 go-live has been a huge change initiative for Sanford, which has impacted almost everyone throughout the organisation in some way over the last couple of years. The build-up to go live in terms of planning and data migration was significant. All of Sanford’s inventory, its purchasing and manufacturing integrations across its processing and storage sites went live simultaneously. This was also made more complex by a complete overhaul of all its product master data. The data mapping work involved in over 3500 SKUs across over 800 inventory locations across 3rd Party Logistics, 3rd Party Manufacturing, Vessels and Sanford sites was in itself an epic piece of work. Understanding the importance of master data had been growing steadily over the project timeline and with several Master data champions across the business, the focus in this area had been a worthwhile investment.

Integrations with MES and with other external partners were found to be more resource intensive and challenging than originally assumed. Having designs for both ERP and MES in a state of flux at the same time presented some unique challenges for our integration teams in terms of pinning down filed mappings and building firm functional and technical design documents. There was no blueprint for our ERP to MES integration with the teams needing to iterate and make practical choices on the way through. The level of collaboration required across our business, program and partner teams was significant, and a high degree of rework was experienced as we learned more and revisited / optimized our design. Overall, the integration team delivered all the “temporary integrations” MES to legacy ERP and over 30 long term integration points supporting MES to D365 and D365 to 3rd parties.

In collaboration with Sealord and MPI, Sanford built an industry tool to manage and trade or Allowable Catch Entitlement (ACE), effectively quota with the intention that this product is made available commercially to NZ fishing industry in the future. We undertook a significant in-house application build to automate our payroll calculations to Crew and to contract fishers with our new CrewPay solution now live and supporting regular payments.

The perseverance and work ethic across many has been a testament to Sanford’s culture and only through its people was the project able to come to a successful go live. There is certainly more work to do to stabilise and optimise business processes and data so our business stakeholders must see the current and future benefits they have sought through this project. We now have the start of a journey into the future to showcase and deliver our beautiful New Zealand seafood to both local and international customers.

Louise Wood is the Chief Supply Chain Officer at Sanford Limited.