The road straight from the field, through the factory and store shelves to the homes of millions of Poles is traveled daily by products from the ready-to-eat category of the Green Factory brand, known to consumers, among others. Under the name Fit & Easy. The industry leader in Central and Eastern Europe serves clients such as major retail chains, including. Biedronka and LIDL, as well as major HoReCa companies – including, among others. McDonald’s. The company began its digital transformation process in 2020. Today, thanks to Polish technology company Webcon, it has a powerful IT ecosystem supporting business processes in 7 Green Holding Group companies and supporting agile business development.
The founder, Artur Rytel, started in 1997 as co-owner of a small vegetable processing plant. Today, the Green Holding group includes 11 companies, 3 farms covering 1,000 hectares and nearly 1,500 employees. As the market leader in Central and Eastern Europe, Green Factory is also expanding operations in Ukraine, Lithuania and Hungary. The goal – to supply retail chains and the HoReCa sector with the best quality fresh vegetables, salad and vegetable mixes and plant-based ready meals. Among others, the company is assisting in its implementation. An innovative approach to business process automation.
Fresh means “just in time”
The vegetable leader operates in the spirit of lean management, which means a commitment to fast delivery of quality products, strengthening efficiency and continuous improvement. Only with this approach do vegetables have a chance to reach plates quickly while retaining their qualities.
– The nature of our business requires a very high level of organizational and communication agility, and this in turn places high demands on IT systems to support the business. When we embarked on a large-scale enterprise digital transformation project in 2020, the first challenge was to find a flexible IT solution that would allow us to efficiently build applications to support our complex business processes and integrate them with subsequent group companies. Low-code platform from Webcon proved to be the right choice – explains Adrian Nawrocki, IT Director at Green Holding.
New products on the shelves faster
In two years of work on the Webcon BPS platform, Green Holding, in cooperation with GoNextStage, has developed an entire IT ecosystem to support the handling of key business processes. Applications have been developed for the circulation of raw material and commodity invoices, the handling of contracts and the processing of export-related documents. But that’s not all. The company also automates with low-code investment projects for example the development and implementation of new products.
The application, which automatically collects data on the composition, manufacturing technology, storage and packaging details of new items in the company’s offerings, significantly improves communication between departments involved in innovation, and thus reduces the time it takes to introduce products to new markets.
However, this is not the end of the story: more implementations are planned, among others. applications to streamline budgeting, contract negotiation or company operations.
“Rolling” processes
Webcon also proved itself at Green Holding as an environment for streamlining IT implementations in an expansive structure of more than a dozen companies, operating in several markets. The key to success has been the development of an appropriate strategy for rapid “rollout,” i.e. implementation of solutions in subsequent group companies.
– Inherent in the so-called “rollout,” is the dilemma between implementing a single standard and adapting it to local business requirements, or developing dedicated applications for each market. The first strategy has the advantage of using locally developed and tested solutions to modernize the operations of companies in other countries. This is exactly the solution we advised Green Holding using Webcon’s platform features to support multisite. As a result, as we work on the application infrastructure at more companies, we are automating production, administrative, controlling and investment processes while maintaining the unique needs of each company. – emphasizes Stanislaw Korwin-Kossakowski, Senior Business Analyst at GoNextStage.
