Dole Asia Company Limited

Dole Asia Company Limited, is one of the world’s largest producers and marketers of high-quality fresh fruit and fresh vegetables.

Dole Asia Company Limited operates across more than a dozen Asian countries with 43 business units. Its multi-location presence combined with a collection of homegrown systems, outdated ERP technology, and a highly fragmented IT landscape naturally created complexity. Without a single source of truth, management teams experienced increasing difficulty making day-to-day business decisions.

Dole chose to work with KPMG in Singapore due to deep technical and functional expertise, global presence, and capability to deliver a multi-country solution, and a commitment to hands-on leadership.

With an immediate goal to standardize and modernize, Project Horizon was launched. Dole Asia’s C-suite became actively involved, attending weekly calls, helping to ensure business goals aligned with the technology design.

Once the multitude of business processes were assessed and analyzed, SAP emerged as the appropriate System Application and Product to help them achieve the goals and objectives of the large-scale, end-to-end business transformation project.

The KPMG team leveraged the proprietary KPMG Powered Enterprise offering and Target Operating Model in combination with leading market practices. Wave 1 focused on business process re-engineering (BPR) with the bigger Asian countries. Wave 2 capitalized on that established BPR work to allow the KPMG team to go deeper on the smaller countries’ niche areas. KPMG professionals also delivered a proof of concept for Internet of things (IOT) and robotic process automation (RPA) for future automation.

Change management was a critical component for the success of the transformation. Ultimately, the team KPMG undertook extensive stakeholder engagement, co-designed technology training and built and delivered wide-ranging targeted communications for 3,800 Dole users across Asia to help them understand, adopt, and execute new ways of working.

With a central and modern SAP ERP in place, Dole Asia has achieved visualization of their full scope of revenue and costs from soil to market in a timely and accurate manner. They have realized notable cost-efficiencies, improved cross-functional collaboration and governance, and created time-saving automation. Their new capabilities enable leaders to make strategic decisions based on tangible business insights supported by data coming from one source.

As the KPMG team worked alongside Dole stakeholders, Dole expressed that this ‘one team’ approach was “the key ingredient for the successful execution” of the project. This genuine approach has opened conversations to introduce future technology solutions, consolidations, and advanced calculations.