Based in Skåne, Sweden, Vidinge Grönt sells around 900 tonnes of fresh vegetable products per month across Scandinavia. Previously focused on the private label business, the sixth-generation family business adopted a bold growth strategy to increase market share by also selling healthy, ready-to-eat products under its own brand directly to food retailers like grocery stores.
This required a new business platform and strategy to support a new sales organization, new direct distribution capabilities and new ways of working.
Columbus, who was already providing application management services (AMS) for the existing ERP system, proposed a pre-study to ensure that Vidinge’s new business platform would align with their long-term strategic goals.
This was the best way to ensure a potential upgrade to Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations was the right decision.
Aligning key stakeholder mindsets
A series of pre-study workshops were held with Columbus management consultants, all of the Vidinge Grönt management team and several key stakeholders from various parts of Vidinge’s organization. This helped secure broad organizational alignment around key strategic goals, making it easier to identify what was needed in terms of features and benefits to best meet these goals.
“At Columbus, we aim to be a strategic advisor," says Björn Åsbrink, Head of Strategy & Change at Columbus. "This means helping companies adapt their processes and systems to new business models and strategies."
And that was exactly what we did in the pre-study for Vidinge Grönt by gathering a wide cross section of their organization and stimulating fruitful discussion in an end-to-end process.
"The focus was on linking the overall strategy to business goals, highlighting strategic areas of improvement, mapping benefits and performing a strategic analysis of all relevant processes,” continues Björn.
Challenging old truths with strategic advice
Vidinge Grönt’s business transformation required a higher rate of automation and easier integrations to ensure maximum efficiency for current and future business plans and operating models. At the same time, more powerful forecasting capabilities were essential for supporting data-driven decision making on matters of pricing and supply for direct distribution.
According to Måns Nordmark, CEO of Vidinge Grönt, strategic advice from Columbus and a focus on the big picture made it easier to align both processes and functionalities around an overall strategy.
He said: "By challenging old truths and staying focused on key needs and benefits from an overall strategic perspective, the best path forward was made much clearer.
"Also, we were able to better conceptualize our long-term strategy and define clear steps by obtaining a better understanding of what we want to achieve in practice with our strategic goals.