As a scale-up, how do you prepare to double production? Together with SAP partner Quinso, White Fields replaced its Office application-based administration with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition in three months. This move gives the mushroom producer better insight into financial and logistical processes and lays the foundation for further growth.
White Fields is a Dutch company with a special story set in Germany. It grows white and brown mushrooms, but not on beds one above the other as is common. “The top bed is always the easiest to harvest, so we only have ‘top’ beds,” says Paul van den Berg, co-owner of White Fields. However, this innovative concept required a lot of space. The company did not find that in the Netherlands, but rather just across the border in Wankum, Germany.
An advanced cooling and heating system in the beds also allows White Fields to produce faster with fewer raw materials. Current production is at 60,000 kilograms of mushrooms per week, all of which are picked by hand. That’s 240,000 250-gram trays that all find their way to German retailers. The company also packs another 20,000 kilos of purchased mushrooms every week, from organic mushrooms to oyster mushrooms.
Doubling production
Those numbers won’t stop there. “We have room to double production again,” notes Van den Berg. But with current production, White Fields already encountered the limitations of its applications for supply chain processes. “With such quantities of mushrooms going from the growing beds to the cold storage rooms, the packaging area and then to the trucks, it is simply no longer possible to register everything via Excel. That takes too much time, is error-prone and you lose the overview and grip on the finances.”
“With some 75 employees now, the organization had become too large to manage with Excel,” says Jan Tielemans, project manager at Quinso. “Paul was working day and night with a colleague to keep everything on track. They received so many different signals with the risk that they also missed signals. There was an urgent need for an integrated system.”
Integrated ERP system
SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition turned out to be the best choice for White Fields. “The company actually consists of three parts: a manufacturing company, a trading company and a real estate company,” explains Tielemans. “SAP makes it possible to integrate these parts well, so it feels like you’re working with one organization and not ‘in between organizations.’”
“In addition, our customers require electronic documents to be exchanged via EDI (Electronic Data Interchange). SAP provides that capability,” Van den Berg adds. The fact that S/4HANA runs in the public cloud was another deciding factor. Tielemans: “An on-premise solution was not an option. I also see no reason why an SME without an IT staff should invest in its own servers.”
New way of working
The implementation of SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition was completed in just three months. Says Tielemans, “In October 2023, we set up the best practices offered by SAP specifically for the three companies. In order to train the users step-by-step, we went live with the manufacturing company as early as November, which gave us the opportunity to test and adapt the system in practice. The trading and real estate companies followed at the end of December.”
Still, the real work begins only after the go live, notes Quinso’s project manager. “Smaller companies often do not yet have structured processes. The introduction of an integrated ERP system is then a real gamechanger. Where, for example, a delivery note in Excel can be adjusted just as quickly, that doesn’t work in an ERP environment. After the go live, employees are confronted with a completely new way of working. It is important that they receive proper guidance and training in this.”
Started small
Van den Berg looks back on the project with satisfaction. He cited as key success factors the knowledge Quinso had of White Fields and the approach taken. “We deliberately started small. You can want to tackle everything right away, but it’s important to keep it manageable and expand the functionality step by step.”
“That’s also the idea behind the GROW with SAP program,” Tielemans adds. “It allows SMEs to start small with the implementation of S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition. In the case of White Fields, we first focused on getting the flow of goods right so that there was a consistent and reliable foundation. That just had to be in place.”
“The steps planned for the next two years can all be realized with S/4HANA,” Tielemans continued. “The system offers many possibilities, such as a built-in quality system. With SAP’s Business Technology Platform (BTP), we can also develop our own scanning solutions or applications. For example, White Fields eventually wants to be able to register flows of goods per pallet. We are going to realize that, but we deliberately did not implement it immediately to reduce complexity.”
More accurate understanding
“Because of SAP S/4HANA, we have much faster insight into both our financial and logistics processes,” Van den Berg concludes. “Because all business information is standardized in the system, we have reduced margins of error and save time and costs. For example, we now have a much more accurate understanding of our inventory. With Excel we thought we knew what we had, but now we really know.”
Support planned growth like White Fields?
White Fields implemented SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud in 3 months, allowing them to meet their customers’ demand. Do you also want to support your organization’s planned growth? And thus future-proof your organization? S/4HANA Public Cloud is the right match for any organization. Not only for large organizations, but certainly also for SME Netherlands. These are precisely the organizations we guide in implementing S/4HANA Public Cloud and cashing in on the potential of this innovative software.