For all the wonders of modern computer systems, sometimes nature has the last word in how an IT project unfolds.

That was the case at Pacifica Seafoods, whose rollout of a new Microsoft Dynamics AX ERP system over a couple of days was determined by the life-cycle of the greenshell mussels the company farms.

Pacifica business systems manager Paul Starling was head-hunted from Europe to manage and develop Pacifica’s IT operations.

At the time, Pacifica was using integrated ERP systems Protean and Avantis. However, there were concerns about inadequate local support for the products and the absence of a clear product roadmap.

“I got a phone call one night asking if I’d like to apply for this job and I thought: ‘Yep, okay’.”

The call wasn’t completely out of the blue, since Starling had passed his CV on to New Zealand agencies six months before.

When he joined Pacifica, which is based in Christchurch, he found it was one of just a couple of Protean and Avantis sites in the country, which meant support was limited. Issues that couldn’t be dealt with locally were escalated to Europe, and the time difference could mean a 48-hour wait for answers.

On top of that the products had changed hands a number of times, raising concerns about their future viability.

After first knocking Pacifica’s existing systems into shape, Starling convinced the board that a new ERP system was in order. Having seen its investment in Protean and Avantis evaporate, the company was intent on ensuring its new system endured.

“If you have to bring in a new system every so many years, that’s got great cost. Not just financial cost, but all the intangibles – staff get up to speed with a system, then you give them something new, and they have to go through the whole learning curve again,” says Starling.

His top two priorities were, therefore, that the replacement must come from a committed, stable supplier, and that it should have strong local support.

In addition, Pacifica wanted the simplicity of a single product, rather than the integrated Protean-Avantis approach, and a system that would allow streamlining of its logistics — the purchasing, inventory, production, sales order processing and despatch functions.

This detailed set of criteria led Pacifica to Microsoft Dynamics AX, and implementation partner Koorb Consulting. Auckland-based Koorb has good credentials, with several customers in the food production and processing sector, which, Starling says, gave Pacifica comfort.

“It was nice to know they’d done similar things in the past, so they knew how to use the product and to configure it to our needs.”

Life-cycle determines timing
Pacifica and Koorb began working on an implementation plan in early 2007. The timing was important because the best opportunity Pacifica would have for going live with the new system would be around the middle of the year, when mussels spawn.

During that six-week period mussel production comes to a halt, allowing the company’s ERP system to be taken offline.

With that window in mind, Koorb and Pacifica got down to business.

In the lead-up to making a product choice, Pacifica had set up a “super-user” group with a representative from each department to get a handle on the issues that were going to be important from an end-user point of view. Koorb, meanwhile, sent a couple of staff south to work with the company on a deployment plan.

Koorb’s Pacifica project manager, Mark Green, says it was a matter of taking Dynamics AX’s standard ERP functionality and modifying it for a mussel-processing operation.

“A lot of that was around traceability of batches of mussels from the water; their delivery to the factory, where they are weighed and graded; then their transfer to two production lines, for half-shell and meat mussels.”

Batch traceability is important in case of disease. Shellfish harvested from Pacifica’s Banks Peninsula and Marlborough Sounds farms arrive in Christchurch by road in bags weighing up to a tonne.

Each batch is bar-coded, tested and tracked through the processing facility, so, if any quality issue arises, the mussels can be traced to exactly where they were harvested from, and nearby mussels also checked.

Dynamics AX makes much of this tracking automatic. One of the unique features of Pacifica’s implementation is a Koorb-developed interface for wall-mounted touch screen devices.

These are used by workers throughout the factory at grading, pre-cook, production ‘report as finished’, palletisation and inventory, with each unit interfacing with wireless barcode scanners, which read the barcode tags.

The result is a system that allows Pacifica to process up to 120 tonnes of mussels a day, throughput that is 60 percent higher than when Dynamics AX was first implemented.

In that time the company has also begun farming and processing salmon, which the software has been adapted to cope with.

In the past season Pacifica has produced more than 14,000 tonnes of mussels and over 200 tonnes of salmon, with Dynamics AX all the while delivering real-time inventory data.

“Having real-time inventory data has been a major benefit.

The improved accuracy enables more efficient production and customer service, and improves raw material planning and purchasing.”

Starling says the relationship with Koorb is “open and honest” and, on that basis, planning is under way to upgrade from Dynamics AX 4 to Dynamics AX 2011, with the promise of being able to extract even more business intelligence from the system.

When that time comes, the deployment team will once again be waiting for nature to take its course and open a window for them to do their work.





> Koorb Consulting
W: www.koorb.com
Nicholas Birch
E: nbirch@koorb.co.nz
P: 09 361 1304



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