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View from the Top -
Part 2 | Part
1
Read Part 1
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COMPANY FILE
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Geest Limited is a leading UK-based
fresh prepared foods and produce company. It supplies
over 4,500 products to its customers – the major supermarkets
and food service providers.
The name Geest originates from the
van Geest family who had worked in horticulture in the
Netherlands since the late 1800s. In 1935, the first
Geest company was founded in the UK to develop the sale
of bulbs. In the 1940s Geest diversified into fresh
produce and in the 1970s into fresh prepared foods.
Geest now has over 40 manufacturing sites. Most are
in the UK with overseas sites in Belgium, France, Spain
and South Africa. It employs around 14,000 people.
In 2004, the company had a turnover
of £830.6 million and operating profit of £36.4 million.
In May 2005, Geest was acquired by Bakkavör, a food
manufacturing company of Icelandic origin specialising
in chilled convenience foods. Bakkavör’s pro forma turnover
is around £1 billion.
The business operates a decentralised
structure and requires real-time information to make
immediate operational decisions. It is standardising
on SSA’s Protean ERP package in order to achieve this.
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Q: YOU EMPHASISE PROCESS RE-DESIGN IN EACH BUSINESS, AS
MUCH AS SIMPLY INSTALLING THE SOFTWARE?
A: One of the things that attracted me to this project was
Geest’s commitment to a threephased approach – convergence,
implementation and exploitation. With ‘convergence’, we bring
people up to a base level in their business processes. We
implement and then the ‘exploitation’ team handles the ongoing
management of the system.
With lots of ERP implementations there is no ongoing philosophy
about how you will use it after go-live. Everyone is ‘When
do we go live, when do we go live?’ and then a few months
after that, there is a risk that people start losing interest.
To prevent this from happening, our exploitation team sits
within the IS function and they will take Protean further,
to put it deeper into each factory.
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Conspectus 2006
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Copyright © 2006
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