Infor, a global leader in business cloud software specialised by industry, has awarded Bega Cheese Limited chief information officer Zack Chisholm as the recipient of its first CIO of the Year award in Asia-Pacific as part of its 2020 Infor Customer Excellence Awards. These annual awards recognise customers that drive innovation and showcase exceptional business results.
A panel of Infor solution and industry experts evaluated each applicant on scope and depth of performance improvement, quantifiable business benefits, customer focus and satisfaction, and technology use and innovation. Award winners and finalists were recognised at the first-ever digital Inforum APAC, Sept 16.
The publicly listed Bega Cheese Limited is a leading dairy and food producer of cheese, infant formula, nutritional powders, and home to one of the most iconic brands in Australia – Vegemite.
Bega has a vision to become The Great Australian Food Company and knows that technology plays a critical role in keeping them agile as the business grows. Led by Chisholm, the company has been working to transform the technology landscape to support the business growth and to lay the foundations to better compete on a global stage. To do this, Bega knew it needed to be able to implement change quickly and stay on the most current versions of their systems. For this reason, Bega has implemented Infor’s Testing as a Service (TaaS) cloud solution allowing it to achieve the benefits from the latest technology while minimising risk. Bega recognised that to release changes quickly it required a robust and effective way to test across the system, especially integrations and extensions. After implementing Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage, the company has been able to further optimise a range of processes across the supply chain, finance and operations. By using the TaaS solution, Bega has more certainty with its results by minimising disruptions to production.
“Infor has been a key partner in our journey to the cloud and in order to keep pace and manage some of the challenges we have faced this year with natural disasters such as drought, bushfires and now the pandemic the team have been working hard to achieve the pace of change we need to support the business,” said Chisholm.
“We have hit many milestones together with Infor, and one highlight has been our ability now to script and automate our testing end to end and increase our pace of change. Testing our environment now takes 16 hours, down from 450 hours in the pre-Infor, manual days. This vast improvement has been a real enabler for rapid change in the business,” he said.
Infor ANZ managing director Jarrod Kinchington congratulated Chisholm on his win, and said he was thrilled that Infor was supporting Bega to optimise its supply chain.
“The Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage solution is built specifically for the F&B sector. Its comprehensive system architecture has enabled Bega to accelerate its global supply chain and bring products to market faster. Bega knows that technology plays a critical role in keeping them agile as it continues to grow, and we’re so proud to help Zack and his team deliver stellar results during and beyond their transformation journey.
“Our deep industry expertise and ability to rapidly deploy cloud technology has enabled Bega to quickly respond to the many challenges currently being faced by the sector, and future-proof its IT investments to deliver maximum return on investment,” said Kinchington.
