The LaManna Premier Group (LPG) was formed in 2016 following the merger of the Premier Fruits Group and the LaManna Group creating an operating business turning over in excess of $500 million annually. LPG is one of Australia’s largest fresh produce supply chain companies providing both its domestic and overseas customers with a single source of supply across a diverse range of fruit and vegetable categories. The Group’s farm production capacity spans all Australian states and includes open field growing as well as protected cropping.
The Challenge
Premier Fruits Group (PFG) and the LaManna Group (LG) both had MPLS private network implementations through two different incumbent providers (PFG – Systima, LG – Telstra). Line of Business systems, ERP and email communication tools were not aligned across the business. This made office consolidation difficult as applications could not follow staff easily or would result in a poor user experience due to capacity constraints. Apart from the productivity and collaboration issues, operating expenditure to support the disparate environment was high.
The Solution
After a thorough tender process, Systima was entrusted by LPG to extend and enhance the national MPLS private network to all sites and centralise key systems between the business through a combination of Hybrid Private Cloud and Software as a Service offerings. The solution and strategy would provide the scale required to cater for the groups growing ambition. The transformation project included:
- Rollout/extend the National MPLS private network with high capacity links, improved performance, Quality of Service (QoS) and automatic failover
- Migration of ERP systems from Pronto to Ironbark across the group with no business impact
- Migrate and consolidate server footprint to a single Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) hosting platform
- Migrate email and collaboration suite from GSuite to Microsoft Office 365
- Facilitate deployment of new Time and Attendance (MitreFinch) and Payroll systems (HR3)
- Implement a new single national Active Directory Structure and migrate workstations
- Implement and migrate to a fixed fee national hosted Mitel Voice and Unified Communication system
- Enhance IT Security Policies and mitigate business risk, improve disaster recovery position
- Standardised infrastructure at remote sites including networking switching and Enterprise WiFi improving performance and removing complexity
- Rollout of a national IT helpdesk as a Systima Managed Service for the group supporting all technology functions 24/7
- Streamline management and improve visibility across application usage and IT assets allowing for better capacity planning and lifecycle management
