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Azucarera, our sugar business in Spain, has continually developed and implemented innovative ways to simplify and automate processes, reduce costs and improve efficiencies. We have achieved this across the supply chain, from field to factory, to customer deliveries.
In the field, we have significantly increased the use of mobile applications to integrate the activities of our growers and agricultural teams, allowing both parties to prioritise and focus on how best to use their time, including when managing crop growth plans. The field satellite images and real-time data we now have enable us to make immediate decisions in partnership with our growers. These include the ability to make informed decisions about the required quantity and location for fertiliser application. The ability to monitor water levels and climatic conditions also informs our irrigation decisions and allows us to make transport arrangements without having to visit the fields.
The ability to respond to varying crop sizes and changing customer demand is also crucial across our factories in both the north and south of Spain.
To support this and our leaner factory teams, we have introduced tools to automate various time-intensive processes, such as managing shift changes, maintenance planning and storage and warehousing controls. For example, digitised maintenance planning has delivered benefits such as the ability to create alerts on areas that need immediate attention or require investigation. This has led to us halving our maintenance costs in the past six years, with no impact on the high reliability levels in our factories. Managing maintenance in this manner allows our engineers to focus on projects that can improve our sustainability performance, particularly energy efficiency and decarbonisation.
The wide range of sugar products and co-products leaving our factories makes the way we work with our logistics suppliers a key factor in our ability to deliver quality products on time. Together with our suppliers, we are using technology to automatically map routes that match our customers’ demand-planning requirements. This also gives our customers all vehicle and order data automatically.
The tools we have introduced for our commercial teams and customers help position us as a supplier of choice. These include a central Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool, which stores customer data, interactions and market analysis as well as all online contracting and documentation information. This has further enhanced our data analysis capability, improving our insight and ability to serve our customers.
As we operate across multiple factory sites and office locations, we have streamlined processes to reduce the time people spend on administrative tasks. We now have two new mobile applications, one of which covers processes like travel requests and approvals, timesheet submissions, absence and holiday reporting. The other covers invoice management, managing factory KPIs, monitoring various parts of the factories and approving customer orders. In the past five years, digitisation has enabled us to reduce 40% of administrative tasks.
Our approach to digitisation is improving operational efficiency and allowing our people to focus on the work that drives most value for the business. It underlines the importance of team effort and a culture which embraces continual change, with people and technology working hand in hand.