Danish Agro
Danish Agro was founded over 100 years ago as a cooperative of Danish farmers. Their goal: help farmers around the Baltic Sea region develop their business. Today, Danish Agro leads the Nordic market with 9,000 cooperative owners and 5,000 employees. They offer sales of feed, seeds, fertilizers, plant protection products, and agricultural (rental) machinery.
Challenge
In 2016 Danish Agro acquired the rights to distribute CLAAS agricultural machinery in Sweden to develop their Swedish operations. It established a completely new organization with departments at 12 locations throughout Sweden, including an extensive spare parts warehouse.
With six different business areas and 110 companies now in the group, Danish Agro found it lacked a solid growth strategy. It needed that to excel in both existing and new markets.
After further examination, it was clear that the organization was missing a synergy between the companies. Because of that, it couldn’t successfully utilize the same KPIs and processes across the organization. It needed a competent business system that would support its operations and spare parts management and maintenance.
Approach
After researching the various options out there, Danish Agro reached out to us to implement Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations. Having already researched the possibilities, it knew which solution it needed and why it needed it. The company asked us to carry out the organization, implementation, and surrounding activities.
As an additional measure, and to keep their particular systems future-proof, we got the go-ahead from Danish Agro to add Annata 365 into the mix. This is an industry-oriented business solution. It’s specially developed to handle the management and maintenance of vehicles and other capital-intensive equipment (agricultural machinery, in this instance) throughout the product life cycle.
It was crucial that the new system could handle a huge spare parts inventory and the accompanying prices. After all, Danish Agro’s company catalog consists of more than one million items! We wanted to ensure that the entire system was fully automated from order requests to warehousing to delivery; one seamless and transparent journey.
With Annata 365, we have a business system that is completely adapted to manage our machines. It supports our processes and how we want to work.
Result
Today, when a customer orders a spare part from Danish Agro, the entire process is handled automatically. From the moment the order is placed, a picklist is created at the local warehouse. If the spare part isn’t available, a transfer order goes immediately to the main spare parts warehouse in Sweden. If necessary, an order is placed automatically to the main warehouse from the supplier in, for example, Germany.
We also ensured the central warehouse achieved a high degree of automation. We integrated elevator machines and automated processes so the warehouse workers can complete finished picks and deliveries with just a few clicks.
Danish Agro is well on its way to further success with a global template for their business platform. It has the functionality it needs and can sell agricultural machinery, while handling the entire aftermarket professionally and cost-effectively. It was our pleasure to help Danish Agro take this leap in increasing company-wide synergy and efficiency.
