Worldwide Fruit

About the company

Established in January 2000, Worldwide Fruit is an award-winning business, supplying top quality fruit to the UK’s leading supermarkets.

Specialising in apples, pears and avocados and with offices in Spalding, Lincolnshire and Whitstable, Kent, they employ in the region of 250 staff and turnover £114 million per annum.

Product is sourced from top quality suppliers in the UK, New Zealand, South America, South Africa, USA and Europe.

Worldwide’s Packhouse at Spalding handles 4.4 million cases per annum which equates to 52.8 million packs.

Challenges

The Finance team at Worldwide Fruit went through vast amounts of spreadsheets that were 300-400MB in size, due to the mix between the number of product lines, packing locations and customers which also meant when opened, they were very unstable.

Their current set up was not robust enough and needed one centralised forecasting system that was consistent whoever was reading it.

The Result

With the new system in place they can now load up the actual data from previous years, and with the splashing tool lift last year’s actuals into the current year’s forecast without mixing up the products.

They can now also bring in live data to go alongside the forecasting which provides them with feedback on how accurate the projects are doing, where to expect growth/fallbacks as well as produce a variance analysis.

A lot of time saved; the amount of time the account managers used to take to put their budgets into spreadsheets, which got passed across to the procurement team with finance consolidating it all together, querying the data, and then going back and asking ‘can you change certain areas was overwhelming.

Worldwide Fruit is constantly evolving too and as things can change quite quickly, having a flexible system that can adapt to these changes has been very positive.

The solution makes it possible to easily analysis the huge variety of SKU’s, Pack Formats by customer.

Consistency between longer-term, High-Level forecast and short-term forecasts, particularly around labour hours. Enabling the organization to easily optimize the ratio of full-time staff and also agency workers on the packing line.

Solution provides up to date daily forecasts for very short-term sales for Account Managers

Easily accessible turnover & volume data for packing locations including third-party locations

In the case of Fruit Processors accurate forecasts for the ripening process to ensure that customer orders are fulfilled but also not too much fruit is ripened causing waste.