Fishing giant Sealord looks to Infor to modernise its ERP systems

Infor's SaaS-based CloudSuite was selected after a competitive tender.

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New Zealand seafood giant Sealord has selected Infor's CloudSuite in a seven-year, multi-tenant, software-as-a-service ERP agreement.

Sealord will use Infor food and beverage (F&B) and Infor supply chain planning SaaS software to enhance productivity, improve forecasting and better measure sustainability.

As an asset-intensive business, Sealord was also looking to incorporate a stronger and modernised asset management solution to cater to its end-to-end requirements. These include purchase and commissioning, maintenance and asset management, and tracking from both land and sea-based users.

Along with reducing risk and improving efficiencies across the business, Sealord also wants to promote positive sustainability practices. Infor CloudSuite F&B will be used to establish carbon and other sustainability measures such as sea temperature and plastics usage monitoring, to enable and improve reporting, management, and progress on sustainability goals.

"Infor has incorporated deep industry-specific features that are purpose-built within Infor CloudSuite F&B which align with Sealord’s business processes and operations," said Sealord CIO Matthew Dodd.

This resulted in a close fit "out of the box", he said.

"Ultimately, we were looking for a strategic long-term partner to work with, so not only do we value the decades of Infor development that have resulted in strong food-manufacturing capability, but we also appreciate that Infor and Sealord share similar visions for people and culture."

Sealord, which earns around $400 million in revenue annually, also needed to address growing business and security risks associated with its legacy systems.

"Infor will enable us to redesign our core financial systems around current and anticipated business requirements," Dodd said. "With Infor, we will be able to more easily automate workflows, month-end processes, and provide standardised reports to increase productivity across the business."

Sealord will also be able to add lead indicators, statistical data, and other non-financial information in focus areas such as sustainability, market share, employee numbers, customer sentiment, market trends and health and safety data.

The new solution also provided multi-currency financial consolidation so that all Sealord Group companies will be reported and managed within one system, allowing the company to retire costly, standalone consolidation software.

Sealord currently has fishing, aquaculture and land-based factory processing operations in New Zealand and Australia along with sales operations globally.

"Standardising on one procurement system will create process efficiencies and reduce costs," Dodd said. "It will also improve speed and accuracy, as well as the visibility of planning and forecasting."

Sealord would also save time through the use of modern workflow, automation and AI tools.

The win followed a highly competitive tender, Infor A/NZ vice-president and managing director Jarrod Kinchington said.

"We’ve built a very good relationship with the business despite pandemic disruptions," he said. "We look forward to helping Sealord meet its strategic goals so that they can focus on their core business while our platform provides the data and seamless tracking they require."

Sealord has also been working with Datacom to make use of its fishing data to help improve catches and sustainability in a project called "advanced fishing analytics". The project was based on the Azure Cloud and drew on several Microsoft technologies including Azure Data Factory, Azure Data Bricks, Azure Data Lake and Power BI.

Matthew Polson, Datacom’s head of technology, data and analytics, said a critical next step in the project was refining the model and then finding ways to visualise the predictions that make it meaningful for people.

“It’s translating what this all means into a functional tool that can be used for decision making at Sealord,” Polson said.

The expertise, experience and commitment the Datacom team brought to the project was "pretty significant” Sealord’s Dodd said.

“At Sealord we are here for the long-term and fishing responsibly ensures we will have a business in 50 years’ time. Advanced analytics helps us do that by making valid predictions about the future.”