03/02/2025
At the November 2024 CxO Series, Brendan Clark (CIO at Commercial Cold Holdings (CCH) in Cape Town) shared the incredible journey CCH has undertaken over the past 21 months.
The Challenge in Summary:
Unlike many organizations that can spread their target architecture improvement and transformation over a 3 to 5-year journey, CCH need to achieve significant and large-scale change in a 2-to-3-year period.
The journey initially comprised executing a transition of an acquired business (CCS Logistics) from the Oceana Group as well as planning the consolidation of a second purchased business (Sequence Logistics) onto a shared technology platform of scale envisaged by the group.
Following an RFP process supported by logistics industry experts, this rapid transformation had to be planned and executed while each of the individual businesses continues to grow, evolve as well as being able to support additional business acquisitions happening withing the CCH group.
Assessment of the existing operations and infrastructure revealed that this was not a typical brownfield improvement project. There was simply too much legacy to be upgraded so it made more sense to create a new platform and move each business to that platform rather than trying to transform their existing platforms in place.
Using this greenfield opportunity key principles for CCH include a ‘cloud first’ approach and continual optimization of suppliers ensuring local and regional support following the business operating model. Brendan noted one of the key lessons learned so far, suppliers must be able to operate at our pace where we need them to, or we leave them behind and move on to someone who can.
The transition is currently progressing well, with a new group core network infrastructure, Azure & Oracle Cloud hosting and services platform, Warehouse Management System (WMS) and ERP implementation that form backbone of the new CCH Group platform in place currently and being rolled out across the group.
These core products are further supplemented by several other leading cloud-based toolsets including PowerBI, Flowgear and more.
An early transition win has been the implementation of the PaySpace cloud HR platform as well as the move to a common time and attendance solution for the group.
The group has also recently completed their first entirely new facility build focused primarily on the fruit cooling industry in Qbertha.
Currently CCH remains on track to achieve both economies of scale from the platform and overall operational cost savings for the group.
Large-scale projects always come with their own set of challenges and lessons learned, which Brendan shared some of these so far with the attendees.
Challenges and Lessons:
Greenfields: Designing platforms from scratch requires a lot of hands and careful consideration. There is way more to be done than you think, and it takes way more time to execute than you think you have.
Multicloud: High complexity and interdependency with few experienced partners and out-of-the-box solutions ready to go.
Partners: Choose real partners carefully. It’s a long journey, so ‘try before you buy’ and have alternative partner options. Foreign world class solutions are challenging and expensive to support locally. Factor that carefully into overall TCO decision making.
Programme Management: Experienced project, program, and change managers are crucial to overall success. They need to help drive business ownership of change – this is NOT an IT project it’s a business transformation project.
Flexibility: Be ready to pivot and realign as business evolves. M&A activity is important to a growing cold chain business, but it can have in flight project impacts. This in turn means iterative forward planning and architecture tweaking where needed. Your core should however scale easily to accommodate change.
Business Operations: In lean logistics operations like cold chain businesses, early planning and external resource augmentation are necessary on an ongoing basis. The business still needs to operate while it’s being changed from within.
