• Dole South Africa
• Santam
• Intec School of Insurance
• Old Mutual
• Lechabile
• Go2Africa

Dole South Africa was established less than 12 months after the deregulation of the fruit industry, and today Dole is South Africa's 2nd largest fruit exporter. Dole exports a wide variety of citrus and deciduous fruit types to more than 70 countries across the globe including Europe, North America, Russia, the Middle East, the Indian Ocean islands of Mauritius and Reunion, Asia, Indonesia and the Far East.

The Business Case

Dole experienced exponential growth soon after entering South Africa, capturing a significant percentage of the incumbent fruit export market. The company had installed a system to cater for their logistical and financial requirements, but planning was still performed manually, using Excel spreadsheets and an Access database.

Two areas required attention:

Matching supply to demand - Dole's markets each had unique packaging requirements, making it necessary to plan what fruit will be packed in what packaging well in advance of the harvest - a key planning requirement. In addition to these complexities, the continually changing fruit supply and demand estimates created a large workload for the market planners. Much of the knowledge and decisions taken were held by individuals, making continuity of service extremely difficult. Dole also needed very accurate, up-to-date data on current and future stock levels to present to its markets, to allow market planners to source fruit appropriately from world markets. Dole was finding market coordination increasingly time consuming and difficult to manage.

Planning the loading of vessels - Regardless of the plans made, when actually loading a vessel Dole needed to match client orders with actual fruit in stock. As fruit is a perishable item, minimizing dwell times was critical. The company also needed to manage lead times from harvest through packaging, transportation, storage and shipment. The number of variables in the logistical chain and the costs of delayed or incorrect decisions created enormous pressure on Dole's vessel planners and their systems that required manual processing and rework, creating inefficiencies in the business processes. In particular, on a daily basis vessel planners had to completely re-plan all stock allocations, manually comparing current and previous stock levels.

ViaData

ViaData was perceived by Dole as a company that understood its business and was passionate about adding value in a trusted relationship. As a result, ViaData was tasked with investigating the possibility of creating a software solution that would cater for Dole's business requirements.

Solution

ViaData performed a data assessment and created a complete data model of the business before demonstrating the ability of the model to support the business requirements using real business scenarios and data.

ViaData was awarded the contract to develop and integrate Dole's planning system, based on the fact that it had practically demonstrated a thorough understanding of the business requirement and that references attested to ViaData's ability to deliver robust and flexible software.

The new system has benefited Dole in that:

• Market and Vessel Planners' workload has been reduced dramatically.
• Information and decisions are stored centrally and are available to all.
• Changes to supply and demand estimates no longer require a full rework of the market allocations, allowing for management by exception.
• Vessel Planners can work on individual ship manifests without delaying the overall planning process.
• Plans are now retained in the system, despite changing logistical conditions.
• Planning knowledge is retained within the company.

Benoit Galland, the Managing Director of Dole at the time, commented that in his 15 years of working in the fruit industry he had never seen a satisfactory solution but that the solution developed by ViaData for Dole SA solved a large proportion of the manual burden previously required.

To date, ViaData has completed the modelling, design and implementation of Dole's planning system. Since implementing the system in 2001, Dole's business environment, personnel and processes have undergone many changes while the flexibility of the system developed by ViaData has ensured that it has remained virtually unchanged. The system has proved so successful that Dole has appointed ViaData as a strategic business partner. ViaData's latest project at Dole is the design, development and implementation of further major systems to enhance their tools for daily operations that will integrate with the company's other systems.