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Campina joins up its Product Specification Lifecycle Management with Infor Optiva PLM
Campina is a major European dairy company that develops, manufactures, markets and distributes dairy products for European supermarket chains and food and pharmaceutical industries all over the world. Campina employs 7 000 people and has a turnover of 3.9 billion euros. With leading brands including Campina, Landliebe and Mona, the company supplies milk, cheese, butter, desserts, yogurt and all kinds of dairy drinks in over 130 countries. To achieve this, Campina has a series of production and sales facilities throughout Europe and beyond, with its primary headquarters in the Netherlands.
Achieving a greater company wide efficiency
If a production facility in one country over time became the primary production centre for a product or range of products, this facility would end up the natural storage base for the corresponding information for the entire product lifecycle. So facilities in another country with any question about a product or range of products would then have to obtain this question from the main facility. This could be time consuming in tracking down the right person who could access that information. Which in turn is further handicapped if some sites were using SAP, others Excel spreadsheets, while others, had bespoke systems in place. Moreover the information might actually be spread across different systems within one site."
This would be a challenge for any company but for a company with the range and prestige of Campina, and one which is growing continually, it was critical. Verhoeff gives some examples. "Say there's a food scare about a certain ingredient ? GMO's for example. We would need to be able to check across the entire range of products throughout the group to see which products may be affected. This would mean accessing the latest recipe information for every product, and for every destination market because different markets may have country specific recipes. Or again, if there is a change in labeling regulations. We'd have to update every affected product. From an R&D perspective also, accurate access to up-to-date information is critical. An R&D lab in one country may want to begin developing a product for which there is already a partly developed base in another facility. From a customer perspective, they may suddenly change the way they receive and market goods and place specific requirements on us which we would have to adopt. Clearly, what we required was a joined-up, end-to-end, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system."
Infor PLM Optiva provides the best overall business fit
This had been recognised independently in the Netherlands which had attempted to achieve this locally with a specialised custom made system, and in Germany which was trying via SAP. With neither system ultimately delivering true PLM benefits even locally, a top executive decision was taken in the summer of 2002 to source a PLM system that could be implemented across the entire group, and which would deliver local and global PLM benefits. A steering group was assembled from different sites, comprising representative from R&D, Quality Assurance, IT, Operations Managers, Sales/Marketing Managers etc. As Verhoeff comments, the brief was simple. "This group had to answer 3 key questions. 1, Do we need a system? 2, If yes, what type of system do we need? 3, Who is capable of providing such a system?" This phase was finished at the end of 2002 with a shortlist of 6 companies.
An exhaustive specification/expectation list was compiled and supplied to all along with requests about how certain problems would be resolved. This led to 2 being rejected on the first pass. The remaining 4 were invited in to not just demonstrate their system but also to field questions for key Campina personnel about the system and its use. This led to a further reduction to just 2 candidates, a recommended choice and a backup choice. Verhoeff again, "Infor PLM Optiva (formerly Optiva) was ultimately chosen because it provided the best overall business fit for our requirements."
A smooth implementation
Given both the scale and the absolute necessity for the system to work, Campina adopted a phased implementation which began in early 2003. This was known as the prototype phase which essentially was the development of a feasibility study across the whole group which looked at every aspect from how each individual company would run the system to how the information would be ultimately stored and accessed.
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