Digital transformation for APS Salads

If you enjoy a good, wholesome tomato, the chances are you’ve eaten more than one from APS Salads. However, you’d be forgiven if you’d not actually heard of APS Salads before now. They’re responsible for supplying the UK high street and supermarkets with more than 30% of all tomatoes sold each year.

A family owned business, APS are a world renowned pioneer in sustainable produce, continually striving to find new and innovative ways to operate their business whilst reducing the impact on the environment. This strategy demands an efficient and reliable technology infrastructure
to maintain operation and productivity at all times.

IT therefore plays a key role in the production and growth of the order management process and supply chain. At every stage, APS Salads utilise and manage an extensive range of technologies to ensure their products retain a consistency of quality at any time of year. This journey covers planting, seed nurturing, growing, heating & lighting, harvesting, packing, logistics, through to end user distribution.

Many of the IT processes are automated, requiring a highly robust information and management system. Similarly, large volume business efficiencies are also necessary to stay competitive and maintain product consistency and quality.

APS Salads are a champion of sustainability and protecting the environment – delivering innovations around waste management and energy efficiency to the community.

With all of these technology and skills requirements, APS Salads wanted to partner with an experienced organisation that offered a wide and diverse range of technical capabilities, whilst embracing the company’s core family values. The decision was made to work with BCN.

BCN’s 8-year relationship began at a time when APS Salads were stepping up their technology requirements and were seeking a trusted IT supplier to help underpin their growth. BCN’s flexible and highly responsive approach combined with an extensive portfolio made for a great engagement.

Over time these capabilities and services have developed from individual projects to include storage, compute, virtualisation, desktop services, Microsoft applications and support services. Today, BCN provides a fully managed operation, supporting the IT department and all of APS Salads’ users.

Day-to-day technical support from BCN takes care of provisioning, technical and end-user support, service monitoring and pro-active management of the entire IT infrastructure.

Core applications and full application hosting is also managed by BCN, along with backup and disaster recovery.

From a collaboration perspective, all voice and mobile devices are maintained through a hosted, cloud- based telephony platform. As a fully managed, on and off-premise IT service, BCN are able to help APS Salads get on with doing what they do best; growing and distributing the very best of fresh produce.