Modernising BAMA’s core operational systems
Nature rarely follows a delivery schedule. The sun pushes a harvest forward, rain holds it back and volumes swing from one day to the next. Through it all, BAMA still has to fill shelves across Norway every single day.
It is a major operation. BAMA moves roughly 500,000 tonnes of fruit, vegetables, berries and flowers every year to more than 12,000 customers across grocery, foodservice and retail. To support this, BAMA is replacing decades-old, custom-built systems with a unified Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform, developed together with Columbus.
Columbus is an extension of BAMA's technology team. They have the expertise on the technology side, and we have the expertise on the BAMA side.
- Trine-Lise Jensen, Chief Digital and Technology Officer at BAMA
Watch BAMA and Columbus discuss the transformation
In the videos below, representatives from BAMA and Columbus discuss the complexity of fresh produce logistics, the move away from custom-built legacy systems, and why close collaboration between business and technology experts has been central to the transformation.
Fresh produce does not wait
BAMA's operations must handle short lead times, changing volumes, weather-dependent harvests and products with limited shelf lives. Getting this right consistently takes well-built systems and precise coordination across the value chain.
Strawberries illustrate the challenge clearly. “For a strawberry farmer, one of the most important tasks is predicting how much to pick each day. And that depends entirely on the weather. If it suddenly gets two degrees warmer than expected, more berries ripen than planned, and BAMA has to move quickly to handle volumes we hadn't anticipated. Or it can go the other way,” says Jensen.
The same pattern repeats across the value chain and puts real pressure on the systems behind the operation.
You need the right structure and flexibility in the system to handle changes. But technology can't govern everything. Some of it still comes down to the human touch.
-Trine-Lise Jensen, Chief Digital and Technology Officer at BAMA
Building a new foundation for the next phase
At the heart of BAMA's operations is a system the company has built and refined in-house over more than 30 years.“It's a fantastic product, and it has served us well for a very long time. But now it's time to move to standardised applications,” says Jensen.
As BAMA continues to grow, the company needs a foundation that is more standardised, easier to maintain and better suited to continuous development.
Together with Columbus, BAMA is building an ERP platform on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management.
Standardisation has been central to the upgrade.“What mattered most for BAMA in this upgrade was standardisation across the companies. With the pace of technological innovation today, new functionality is constantly emerging. If we want our systems to keep up, we need to be standardised,” says Jensen.
Moving close to 2,000 business processes into one platform takes discipline. You standardise wherever you can, and you lean on people who have done this before and know where the real complexity sits.
- Eivind Hagen, VP Dynamics 365 at Columbus
Where Columbus made the difference
At a high level, a large ERP project can appear relatively simple: pick a platform, move the processes over and go live. In a business like BAMA, the reality is far more complex..
Pricing, transport, claims, production and logistics all involve exceptions and business rules that have developed over decades. Some are easy to describe. Others only surface as BAMA and Columbus work through them together.
To manage this complexity, Columbus put together task forces of specialists from across its global organisation. “We pulled in people from around the world who had solved these exact problems before and assigned them to the hardest areas, including pricing, transport and claims. That is where deep platform knowledge meets real industry experience, and it is where the biggest questions get answered,” says Hagen.
For BAMA, this is where Columbus proved its value. Not only by building the system, but also by helping work out what the system needed to do in the first place.
The technical expertise Columbus brings is something we simply don't have ourselves. The way we have these genuinely good discussions to find solutions, that's what we value the most. You bring your side, we bring the BAMA understanding, and together it becomes very, very good.
- Trine-Lise Jensen, Chief Digital and Technology Officer at BAMA
