Computerworld

Balance Agri-Nutrients first with SAP S4/HANA

First NZ organisation to go live with SAP’s in-memoryERP suite, S/4HANA
  • Stuart Corner (Computerworld New Zealand)
  • 30 August, 2016 11:25

Farmer-owned cooperative Ballance Agri-Nutrients has become the first organisation in New Zealand to go live with SAP’s in-memoryERP suite, S/4HANA.

According to SAP the move has enabled Ballance to increase the productivity of its sales team and has simplified the reporting requirements of its finance team.

“Management sales reporting for example has decreased from two hours to 20 minutes, while key business processes have become 75 percent quicker,” SAP said. “In some cases, delivering real-time insight on a year’s worth of data is taking less than a second.”

Balance CFO, Richard Hopkins, said the speed at which the company was now able to extract insights from data had increased and this had advanced reporting capabilities significantly.

“The team now has more time to focus on the job at hand, and already our month end is easier and quicker to complete thanks to the SAP S/4HANA Finance solution,” he said. “There is no longer even time to go and get a coffee when waiting for a report to process!”

CIO David Scullin said the company was laying the foundation of it its future business strategy. “With a digital core in place, we are already realising significant efficiencies across the organisation. We also have the base on which to build our digital future.

“The journey we are now on will allow us to connect our employees, suppliers, customers and networks to our digital core. With SAP S/4HANA at the centre, we are designing and building solutions that are mobile, intuitive, robust and valuable, enabling our customers to be more autonomous, productive and to do business with us with ease.”

SAP said that Ballance would now focus on enhanced customer engagement and service through connecting SAP Hybris (SAP’s omnichannel customer engagement and commerce products) and its CRM to its S/4HANA digital core. “In addition, with further SAP application deployments planned, Ballance will continue to simplify its business processes,” SAP said.

The S/4HANA implementation was undertaken by SAP gold partner, Soltius. The company’s CEO, Nick Mulcahy, said Soltius would be working with Balance on its upcoming implementation of SAP Hybris.