European food production leader optimizes processes with cloud technologies.
With operations across Poland, Ukraine, and Russia, Copenhagen headquartered food producer Goodvalley uses the Microsoft Azure cloud to connect even its most isolated pork farms, which makes staff more productive, data more secure, and processes better integrated.
In recent years, Denmark’s Goodvalley, a CO2-neutral pork producer with its own raw material supply of crops, pigs, and energy, has expanded successfully into Eastern Europe and Russia.
But having operations in multiple locations—often remote rural areas—made internal coordination more difficult. “As a result, we wanted to tie our operations better together, and also look to better share knowledge and expertise across the group,” says Goodvalley Chief Information Officer Holger Axelgaard.
Goodvalley’s first step was to install Skype for Business, which has become the videoconferencing and IP telephony service used throughout the company. “I cannot underestimate the positive impact Skype for Business had on Goodvalley, as it opened our eyes to what cloud can do,” says Axelgaard. “Team members could work together despite being in different countries, saving not just travel cost, but also time and telephone charges.”
Improved internal business processes
That initial success led to Goodvalley becoming an Office 365 environment for all internal communications and collaboration. “The logical next step for us has been to start exploring what parts of our on-premises physical IT could also better work from the cloud—a process that has led us on to Azure,” Axelgaard says. “Key to our success here has been the great support and architectural guidance we received from our implementation partner, Syntegra.”
Axelgaard believes all Goodvalley systems that can be virtualized have been. That’s 80% of its infrastructure. The remainder of on-premises systems are applications or hardware in areas that are not sufficiently connected to make their replacement feasible.
“In benefits terms, we did not set out to save money through cloud. It was the improvement of internal processes that was our driver,” he says. “We have been able to move expert staff on to more value-add activities, including new application areas cloud is opening up for us. Cloud makes everything so much easier and scalable for us, and what we have seen in terms of improved readiness for GDPR and overall enhanced flexibility tells me this was absolutely the right choice for us.” Next steps for the company include following up on a highly promising early evaluation of Azure advanced services centered on Internet of Things technology—which Goodvalley sees enormous potential in—as well as using Power BI for improved reporting.