Beyond purchasing

26 An inside look | Section III
An inside look:
Making IT fit procurement’s needs at High Liner Foods
One way to improve
the effectiveness of
procurement IT is to make
it fit the needs of the
company, rather than have
the business adapt to the
strengths of the technology.
High Liner Foods, one of North America’s
largest seafood providers, was forced to
go global in its search for raw materials
(seafood) after the collapse of the Grand
Banks fisheries and the subsequent sale
of the company’s fleet in the 1990s. It
soon found that worldwide sourcing was
generating excessive paperwork, and
challenges in both tracking shipments
and informing suppliers of requirements.
The solution was an add­on to the firm’s
ERP system, which lets everyone in the
supply chain, including suppliers,
shippers, customs brokers, and the
company have transparent, real­time
access to the information they need to
do their jobs. They can also update the
data directly on the system. The webbased
technology has become essential
to how the company does business.
Says Paul Snow, Vice President,
Procurement, High Liner Foods “we
don’t know how we could operate
without it. It has become a tool we
need to use.”
How the technology was created and
introduced is as important as the
underlying software:
• Snow believes that “the primary
reason it has been successful is that
we have an IT group in our company
that is interested and dedicated to
developing these kinds of solutions.”
The model was developed internally,
although it has also had extensive
attention from a third­party
software company.
• The software dealt with High Liner’s
most pressing requirement. “The
main part of what this is about is
really involving people involved in the
transaction, and letting them go in and
perform their various functions. The
information is visible to everybody, and
saves a lot of communications, paper
work, and emails.”
• It did not try to do everything at once
but left room for development. For
example, it does not do supplier
performance rating. “That’s really the
next step for us”, says Snow.
• It did not reinvent the wheel. By
building on its existing ERP platform
and working with a long­term software
partner, the project minimized the
need for new training and accelerated
development of the solution.
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