As a company in the pet food industry, when are you future-oriented? A question that Eddy Nijhof, CEO of De Haan Petfood and Board Member of the NVG (Dutch Pet Food Industry) is happy to answer: "With sustainable policies concerning your products, processes, and people. It's as simple as that. The rest will follow automatically." With metal cans as the starting point for its packaging, De Haan Petfood is already starting from a very sustainable situation, according to Eddy: "Metal cans are 100% recyclable. For us, the challenge lies mainly in optimizing our supply chain and internal processes. Reducing waste, reducing the internal paper flow, loading containers optimally, and planning logistics. Automation plays a major facilitating role in this. In order to meet these challenges and our commercial expansion goals, we chose Quistor FoodQloud's ERP application NetSuite."

Central insight and control of the financial and logistic flows

When Eddy Nijhof took over the helm of De Haan Petfood in 2019, there was still a long way to go to become "future-ready". However, Eddy clearly saw potential in the organisation and especially in the product they produced: "De Haan was a loosely organised family business with about 15 employees and one technical production line. With a single user on an accounting software package and Microsoft Access as the central database for invoicing, the topic of automation was not exactly high on the agenda. I wanted to change that immediately. Before we can achieve our ambitious goals, we first had to be well organised administratively. We needed a true ERP application that was easy for employees to use and scalable in view of our sustainability targets, future growth in employees, product lines and international markets."

Collaborate more efficiently and sustainably with NetSuite

After having realized some emergency solutions within the old situation, De Haan Petfood started looking for a suitable ERP system for the pet food industry in 2020. During the selection process, NetSuite emerged as a serious candidate. Eddy: "Oracle NetSuite is a modular business software platform in the cloud, which allows us to start small and add modules in the future. In addition, the platform is very open with a view to industry-specific NetSuite partner add-ons and links with webshops, for example. The basis consists, as standard, of ERP, CRM, Business Intelligence, and — what we find very useful — partner portals. An external partner, as an intermediary, arranges sales for us on the Greek market, for example. By means of the NetSuite partner portals, they can directly enter work orders instead of manually forwarding Word documents. This saves time for both parties and reduces the risk of errors. They can also monitor the status of the orders themselves. This way, we can work together more efficiently and sustainably." In addition to its own brands of dog and cat food, De Haan Petfood produces many private label products for large retailers, among others. The first phase of the NetSuite implementation project focuses on organizing a large variety of product data and getting order and inventory management in order. Eddy: "This allows us to save a lot of time in our day-to-day business."

Ambitious plans for the future

In just one and a half years, De Haan Petfood managed to match their record turnover of 12 million Euro’s with only 20 permanent employees. Eddy: "We are now laying the foundation for our future plans. From a solid foundation, in which NetSuite by FoodQloud plays a major role, we want to grow to an annual turnover of 25 to 30 million euros. Central to these future plans is an expansion in the Western European market with premium canned dog and cat food. For this, we need to be able to connect easily to the retailers' commercial platforms, including through GS1-DAS. With NetSuite, this is very easy. Also, in the field of packaging management, production management, warehouse management, and quality management, we will be able to act quickly in the future if the need arises."