Growing popularity of dried fruit and nuts – in traditional baking, as ingredients for “healthy” breakfast cereals and as substitutes for crisps and chocolate for all-day snacking – has helped Sundora Foods top its league as the UK’s largest processor of tropical fruit and dried tree fruit.

With an offering of 600 products and 80% of its output destined for the major supermarket chains, Sundora depends on SSI’s TROPOS system to ensure efficiency in production planning, material movement and stock control. It also uses TROPOS to provide total traceability of all its products – a key requirement of the supermarkets in an era of tighter control over food standards.

Previously, Sundora had used a mostly paper-based system for production planning and monitoring, which no longer matched the exacting standards demanded by the supermarket chains – or the requirements of modern business. The existing computer system provided no traceability, no quality system and no resource planning. Reporting tools were poor and the system itself was unreliable, with substantial server downtime. Coupled with this, Sundora was not satisfied with the support provided by its system maintenance contractor.

More effective planning and production tools needed

David Figg, Sundora’s former finance and IT director, says: “The business was growing and becoming increasingly complex – and more difficult to manage with the system that we had. To bring it back under control we needed much more effective planning and production tools.

“We needed a more scientific basis for our planning and production. We needed to control our stock better – bringing it in ‘just in time’, not ‘just in case’. Everything was managed manually on spreadsheets with various islands of information – and the business had outgrown that.”

Sundora has been in business since 1946. It is now part of the Harrington Food Group, to which it contributes annual turnover of £32 million. It employs 150 in the UK and also provides 400 jobs in Turkey – one of its main sources of supply.

Home baking and snacks are key markets

Historically, the company grew on the strength of home baking and this, together with fruit and nut snacks, still provides the main market for Sundora products retailed through store chains such as Tesco and Sainsbury’s. The other 20% of Sundora’s output goes to the food service industry – mainly through catering suppliers – who sell to commercial bakers, manufacturers of breakfast cereals and similar downstream processors. Most of Sundora’s output is sold in the UK, but some is exported to Australia and New Zealand.

The business model at Sundora covers the import of fruit and nuts from sources worldwide, then washing, cooking and preparing the raw material as appropriate. Finally it packs, warehouses and distributes the finished product.

Processing and packaging take place at Sundora’s factory at Pocklington, near York. Raw materials are drawn from off-site stores nearby at Full Sutton and at Bridlington, which is slightly more distant. Once packed, the products are warehoused at Pocklington before being shipped out to Tesco and Sainsbury’s distribution hubs or to other distributors.

Importance of upgraded IT to support business

Sundora’s management recognised the importance of upgrading its IT systems to support the current business – and potential growth. Its business objectives for a new IT system included providing full product traceability, better resource planning to improve machine utilisation, more efficient product costing, a single point of data entry and improved management information on all aspects of the business.

David Figg says: “Traceability was a key aspect driven by our customers. With nut allergies and various other issues in the food industry, such as organics and genetic modification, it was vital that we could do this quickly.”

He says: “Our customers were asking us to provide traceability and we’d continued to fail to provide a quick enough response. I think their patience was stretching a little thin.

“If there was a problem, customers would ask us to do a full trace – but it could take a team of five people up to two weeks – that’s what mainly annoyed our customers.

“It would also have a cost impact: because we could not provide a swift enough response they would just take the lot off the shelf. It was not often – we pride ourselves on our quality – once a year, if that. But once a year was too often, especially if there’s significant cost implications.”

Solution meets all requirements

The solution Sundora selected includes SSI’s TROPOS and Coda Financials, which combine to meet all requirements of the business objectives and address the shortcomings of the previous system. It uses a number of TROPOS modules – forecast management, sales order processing, process and recipe control, quality specifications, demand management, works orders, production time bookings and purchasing and invoice clearance. SSI also supplied the reporting system Impromptu from Cognos, which provides Sundora managers with a comprehensive statistical and financial overview of their organisation.

The SSI solution uses bar coding for precise lot control of each product or ingredient as it passes through the process. Incoming lots are bar coded on arrival and information is added at each subsequent stage. This provides full traceability so that, in the unlikely event of a product problem, the affected lot – and the line on which it was packed – can be identified within minutes.

Maximum flexibility, minimum cabling

Data is fed into TROPOS mostly through handheld scanners with radio frequency (RF) connectivity to the server. This ensures that supervisors and other TROPOS users have maximum freedom, and that all stock movements are captured in real time. In addition, the RF system allows flexibility within the factory, as network cabling requirements are minimised.

TROPOS helps to streamline Sundora’s production by providing supervisors with a checklist for line start-up. This ensures that the correct quantities of each ingredient have been drawn from stores and that all other conditions are right: for example, that the necessary machines are available and the packaging film is printed with the correct product sell-by date and country of origin.

David Figg says this is a definite boon. Previously it was easy to use the wrong film or stamp the wrong information, and packs had to be split manually and re-run. “There wasn’t much product wastage but a huge amount of labour and film wastage. If a pack got past, and through to the customer, there could have been a real problem with trading standards and so on. TROPOS has certainly reduced the wastage and the chance for error.”

With TROPOS, Sundora has been able to monitor its costs more effectively. The old manual system was based on latest purchase prices for ingredients. Now, with standard costing in place – based on recipe and process details – the company is more able to manage product profitability.

Better use of working capital

TROPOS eliminates ad hoc decision making in demand management that typically produces problems with obsolete and expired stocks. MRP is driven by forecasts and sales orders, leading to more efficient production and more realistic stock levels to ensure better support to primary distribution centres. As a result, the company is able to make better use of its working capital. TROPOS tools provide a simple visual system enabling Sundora to plan its production on three levels: one week ahead, five weeks ahead for works order requirements and up to 12 months ahead for business-level or investment decisions.

The TROPOS implementation at Sundora went live in March 2003. The system is hosted remotely by SSI at its Basingstoke headquarters, and linked through a 2MB virtual network.

David Figg says, even after a few months, the system was proving its value. “It gave us the visibility to control our stocks better. Everybody is talking about the same information, so there’s much-improved communication. We are benefiting from efficiencies in finance – we now spend more time analysing the data than preparing it.

“We’ve certainly got far fuller and better information now. As with anything, we are improving the use of the system, adding data and cleansing as we go. We expect to get progressively even more benefits over the next two years.

“We’ve had a lot to integrate, so there’s been a lot going on around the system. It has delivered in a number of areas. As with any system, there was a settling down period, but we are looking at moving it on to get more improved processes and improved flows over and beyond where we are now. But we have certainly seen the benefits coming through.”