Technology

Changing what works is hard. It should not be surprising, then, that the country’s largest food producer had been forecasting its full portfolio of about 1 500 products in Microsoft Excel. And this has been the case for decades.

Today, Tiger Brands uses an integrated business planning tool within its SAP ERP system which, according to CFO Thushen Govender, has sophisticated algorithms that allow the group’s business units to better manage demand prediction. “More importantly,” he says, “the intellectual property [now] sits within a system as opposed to an individual”.