Tree Top Looks to Intentia for Business Process Upgrade

Published: April 18, 2006

by Alex Woodie

Tree Top, an apple growing cooperative in the Pacific Northwest, has licensed a full set of enterprise software from Intentia, the software vendor announced last week. The organization will replace several legacy iSeries applications with the Intentia suite, and will run the Movex software on another reliable OS/400 server, IT Jungle has learned.

Tree Top currently represents more than 1,500 apple growers in Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, and brings in more than $250 million per year. Since it was established as a grower-owned apple processor in 1960, the company, which is headquartered in Selah, Washington, has established five production facilities in Washington and a bottling plant in southern California.

The technology refresh will involve migrating a mix of older OS/400 applications, including Infinium accounting software and Marcam manufacturing application, to Movex. At one point, the company also ran Silvon's business intelligence software on an iSeries, according to this four-year-old case study in this newsletter, but it's unclear what applications Tree Top will be replacing with Movex; the company declined to comment on its legacy applications.

What Tree Top did comment on was how Movex, which has a strong reputation in the beverage and bottling industry, was a good fit for the company. "Our business had evolved to a point where we needed to upgrade our core business processes and the technology supporting the processes," said Kent Draney, Tree Top's CIO. "We chose Movex because it will help us improve productivity and increase efficiencies throughout our organization."

The implementation of Movex at Tree Top began with Intentia's Opportunity Analyzer (OA) tool, which personnel from both companies used to mapped Tree Top's existing business rules over to Movex. The OA tool involved such tasks as allocating labor to various processes, and how much time it takes to create a monthly forecast, Intentia says.

With existing business processes as input, the OA tool output a list of 35 best practices, each of which was evaluated in terms of the impact it made on Tree Top's key performance indicators (KPIs). From this, Tree Top can develop a phased implementation plan that Intentia says will have maximum impact.

Draney agrees. "We were able to document why certain KPIs and best practices would yield the most powerful immediate and measurable business results," he says.