Improving product innovation at Nutreco with a global transformation into agile working

Nutreco

Improving product innovation at Nutreco with a global transformation into agile working

Aligning business and IT to shorten time-to-market and deliver better and faster customer value

The Challenge

Before approaching Eraneos, Nutreco’s IT development was carried out by several business units spread around the world. Its developers, therefore, had to constantly switch between multiple projects. Since the company’s stakeholders were also located globally, in order for NutriOpt® to grow into a global product, both Nutreco’s business and IT had to adapt and coordinate their way of working. Software releases were taking six months to complete, for one, and during that process, the business was only involved at the beginning and end of the cycle. Nutreco knew that it had to adapt to the ever-changing environment to realize the growth ambitions of NutriOpt® in the global market, and so it came to Eraneos for help.

Nutreco’s new agile way of working enables the company’s business and IT to work as one global team.

The Approach

Kicking off the project with a phased approach, Eraneos created a dedicated agile IT development team. The IT development team was trained according to the ShuHaRi principle to help it mature so that it could continue the new way of working without external help and, at the same time, serve as an example for the rest of the IT organization. Building on the development team’s experience, Eraneos then turned its attention to the firm’s globally dispersed stakeholders. They were trained in both the Netherlands and Canada to become agile stakeholders who would be able to stimulate the product development of NutriOpt®.

Nutreco is one of the world’s leading animal nutrition and fish feed companies, boasting a range of advanced feed solutions that form the basis of food for millions of consumers around the world. With 100 years of experience, Nutreco brings a rich heritage of knowledge and expertise to the markets in which it operates. The company is perhaps best known for its NutriOpt® modular precision nutrition system, which is made up of proven components that provide the latest nutritional science data and technology. When used together, these modules make it possible to fine-tune feed composition, a model that accurately calculates the most economically efficient approach under the current market conditions to achieve optimal results.

The result

Thanks to our collaboration with Nutreco, the NutriOpt® product now has a global product team behind it, consisting of aligned stakeholders and a global development team collaborating across offices in both Canada and the Netherlands.

Since Nutreco now puts business agility into practice through a global quarterly prioritization session, it means that – for the first time – stakeholders around the world are fully aligned and advancing NutriOpt® product development. Now that all stakeholders are involved in the entire process, the IT development team is able to deliver software every two weeks. Employee engagement at Nutreco is increasing and satisfaction with the NutriOpt® product team is growing as value is delivered continuously.

Let’s create sustainable change together.