By 2050, the world´s population is expected to grow by 22% to 9 billion from 7 billion. To satisfy the growing hunger of mankind, the world will have to double the production of today, using virtually the same land area. Thus, one of the most complex challenges over the next decades for farmers is to ensure that people have access to affordable, wholesome food to sustain their lives, while at the same time avoiding further depletion or pollution of the earth´s natural resources. Novus International is working daily to solve that challenge with the innovations it drives from its localized research and development in nutrition and animal health to boost the yield of farms across the planet and to prevent livestock diseases that affect edibility of meat or human health. Knowing that innovation will be the key driver to realize its vision, Novus started to transform its business in 3 ways: creating more efficient supply chain operations; centrally managing sales and marketing information; and enabling its rural sales force to collaborate with customers anytime, anywhere. Before turning to SAP, Novus had multiple ERP systems in place, making it difficult for executives to centrally access information on key performance indicators. Today, information is being managed through global, standardized processes and fed into SAP Supply Chain Performance Management, providing decision makers with an enterprise-wide scorecard to measure KPIs. Users not only get visibility into actual business results - they can easily create customized dashboards themselves. With drill-down capability, to perform root-cause analysis, operations teams can focus on the areas that caused the KPI to be off track. For a global company with only 800 employees, having that information fingertip ready is mission critical, allowing Novus’ leadership to ensure its staff is allocated efficiently. With real-time reporting, Novus’ leadership can quickly share information and course correct as needed. Efficient operations are most effective when complemented with comprehensive information about the market, readily available anywhere, anytime. Using the SAP Mobile Platform, Novus is developing a mobile marketing intelligence app that will enable employees to capture market information while they are on the road and empower executives to react more quickly to dynamic market conditions. With a pricing workflow app, the company intends to allow for quicker decision making if it comes to balance the customer´s desire the get the best price with the need for Novus to keep its profitability KPIs on track. Finally, SAP Afaria will help ensure that Novus´ device agnostic BYOD strategy complies with local privacy laws and empower IT to push out new apps and updates to the employee’s mobile devices instantaneously. Novus believes that with SAP technology, it is better prepared to manage the challenges lying ahead: increased visibility into KPIs gives the company new opportunities to reduce its carbon footprint by eliminating inefficiencies across the supply chain. When Novus representatives meet with farmers in rural Africa or China, they have all the information they need to jointly develop a customized nutrition program at an affordable price and can capture latest information on the livestock that will empower the research team to develop even better solutions. Farmers can feel confident that they will be able to meet food demand profitably and sustainably. With less hunger in the world, families can focus on providing for their children’s future. |
