Trever Scott, Senior Director, Information Technology-North America, Dole Fresh Fruit Company

SuperNova Award Category

Technology Optimization & Innovation

The Company

Founded in Hawaii in 1851, Dole Food Company, Inc., is the world's largest producer and marketer of high-quality fresh fruit and fresh vegetables. Dole markets a growing line of packaged and frozen foods, and is a produce industry leader in nutrition education and research. The Company had 2010 revenues of $6.9 billion, and does business in more than 90 countries and employs, on average, 36,000 full-time, regular employees and 23,000 full-time seasonal or temporary employees, worldwide.

The Problem

The challenge was enormous.

When I arrived at Dole the ERP system for Dole Fresh Fruit North America was plagued with myriad problems that affected productivity and impacted the bottom line.  

It was not uncommon for the system to be down for more than 24 hours at a time, and for users to experience multiple daily errors, delays and unexpected problems that at times even forced our marine terminal operations personnel to revert to paper and pencil in order to move product through our supply chain.

The Solution

The key that has helped us move from triage to IT excellence has been Application Performance Management software.  

We knew that our IT infrastructure was laden with hardware and software problems, so we needed to implement a solution that would give us insight across our environment, with deep identification capabilities into exactly what was causing our application performance problems.  

Partnering with Compuware enabled us to rapidly zero in on the multiple root causes we needed to address, and proactively monitor our IT system to catch and solve issues before they caused additional problems for our users.

The Results

Compuware APM has not only solved our performance issues, they have enabled IT to regain the trust of the entire organization.  

Before implementing our Compuware APM, our ERP users, marine terminal operators and hundreds of others throughout the company had become so used to IT problems that many accepted them as “business as usual.”

Since that time we have not only regained their trust, we have earned continuous accolades for delivering more advanced IT service and support.  Our entire IT infrastructure has matured, and we are able to focus on long term projects rather than daily triage.

The Technology

Application Performance Management software from Compuware APM

Metrics Matter

Before my project: Our ERP system was continuously plagued by performance issues and downtime.  It was not unusual for the system to be down for hours, and for problems to take weeks or months to diagnose and fix properly.

After my project:  Problems that once took days or weeks to resolve now take minutes. We have also eliminated long extended outages.

Examples of our success:  As a direct result of implementing our APM solution we have experienced a 25-30% reduction in annual IT related incidents, and by solving our connectivity issues within our ERP environment, we have reduced weekly disconnects (disconnects from the ERP system and/or timeouts of the application) from 79 occurrences per week to 1 occurrence per week.

Disruptive Factor

IT has become a trusted partner in the business, and we have dramatically improved company productivity.  In a business where delays mean lost sales and spoiled food products, we have proactively and positively impacted the bottom line.  

Impacting the culture of huge enterprises with complex technology infrastructures and systems is not easy, but our use of new generation APM has enabled my team to do just that.  And, thanks to our successes, we are now implementing major IT initiatives, including mobile solutions, that we would not have been green-lighted for in the past.

Shining Moment

Stabilization of our core business systems using APM has given our IT team the time and ability to focus on new and innovative ways to modernize and improve the Dole Fresh Fruit information technology environment. We’ve not only gained the confidence of our business leaders and process owners, we are now viewed as trusted advisors. IT is now included in the business strategy planning process, enabling us to have input and much more effectively contribute to attaining our business goals.

Examples of areas where our IT team is providing increased business value:

  • Business Continuity Management
  • IT was designated to oversee all Business Continuity Management at Dole Fresh Fruit North America, not just areas pertaining to IT.
  • IT plays an instrumental role in the planning, preparation, training and conducting of mock disaster exercises as well as coordinating organizational wide response during natural disasters.
  • IT has prepared all of our marine shipping terminals with the equipment and training to completely evacuate the necessary IT infrastructure components required to resume operations and dispatch overseas fruit containers from an offsite location.
  • This is especially important given the perishable nature of our products and the hurricane prone areas where our terminals are located.

• Building a New Portal for our Business Unit

  • Our organization is leveraging the most cutting edge portal technology with SharePoint 2013 Enterprise built on SQL 2012. This technology is providing traditional company portal functionality as well as new mobile, social, and collaboration features.
  • We are utilizing it as a modern interface to access data from our old back end legacy systems.  
  • We are using the face of SharePoint to improve the user experience with systems that have very limited functionality and reporting capabilities.  
  • Examples include extracting and presenting required information from our non-core ERP back end legacy systems, thus providing additional functionality that wouldn’t be possible or would take months/years to add into the legacy systems.  This process joins information stored in many non-core ERP related applications allowing business users to access additional pertinent information in one place.  
  • In addition we have used this SharePoint portal as a quick and easy way to roll out public websites for our marine terminals to communicate information to our customers and shipment/logistics carriers – including information from our back end logistics systems and real time gate video camera feeds to see real time truck lane traffic at our marine terminals.
  •  Although at this time we are not able to replace many of our back end legacy systems, we are not allowing this to hold us back from providing a more efficient and seamless user experience for our business users and customers.  
  • Mobilizing our workforce


We realize the future will require IT to provide the ability to perform business functions on mobile devices. Below are examples of what we are doing to meet this critical business requirement:

 

  •  We have fully deployed iOS devices (iPhones and iPads) business wide and are now using Citrix Receiver to enable mobile access to key back-end applications.
  • We created and deployed an iOS accessible mobile application that allows our Sales and Tech Services teams to instantaneously collect key product quality data and characteristics (including photographs of products) at store and warehouse locations. This real time information is now used to immediately identify and mitigate potential quality issues throughout our supply chain. Prior to deploying this mobile application the quality analysis and notification process took weeks and now can be completed in hours.
  • We recently completed a digital strategy giving us a roadmap of additional mobile applications (internally and externally facing mobile applications) and web projects for the next 24 months.
  • Our IT team continues to work collaboratively with all business functions (Operations, Sales, Marketing) to identify and deploy additional business process improvements using mobile technologies.

About Dole

Founded in Hawaii in 1851, Dole Food Company, Inc., with 2010 revenues of $6.9 billion, is the world's largest producer and marketer of high-quality fresh fruit and fresh vegetables. Dole markets a growing line of packaged and frozen foods, and is a produce industry leader in nutrition education and research. The Company does business in more than 90 countries and employs, on average, 36,000 full-time, regular employees and 23,000 full-time seasonal or temporary employees, worldwide. 

http://www.dole.com