Lehman Bros venture capital arm decided to purchase the seafood business of HJ Heinz which included John West, Mareblu and Petit Navine. In doing so it was agreed with Heinz that the new company MW Brands (MWB) would be completely free of Heinz IT applications within one year by end of April 2007. This included the infrastructure, mainframe and other systems. Having worked with Heinz for a number of years Spargonet were invited to bid for the project. Spargonet tendered for the replacing the entire range of applications.
After a selection process we were awarded the work in June 2006. Our solution was to review the requirements with the business and look at the existing systems for functionality. From this a plan and design was constructed to achieve the objectives. The core components of the first Phase of the project were to replace the legacy central applications covering finance, sales, purchasing, warehousing, EDI etc with Microsoft products.
Some of the products used were:
- Microsoft Dynamics NAV – finance, purchasing, sales etc
- Bespoke applications for deals and allowances, QA
- Specialist NAV modules for customs and Warehousing
- BizTalk & Covast for EDI
- SQL Server 2005 for Data Warehousing
- Exchange/Active directory/ MOM/SMS/Terminal Services for infrastructure
Spargonet would also Architect the new Hardware in the form of clustered servers running Windows 2003, SQL Server 2005, Exchange, Active Directory and Windows XP. Spargonet would arrange and manage the hosting of these servers and applications.
The project was a success on all fronts. The UK went live by April 2007 including finance, purchasing sales, BI, EDI etc. The applications have been customised and rolled out by Spargonet to Italy, Holland, Ireland. Spargonet provide hardware, application software and infra-structure support on an SLA basis for all areas. A Microsoft Reference is provided on their website.
