Balance point of the strategies: ‘digitalization’

Cargill’s activities in the Middle East and Africa covering the population of 1 billion of more than 66 countries are managed from Turkey. Cargill Food Middle East, Turkey & Africa Chairperson and CEO Murat Tarakçıoğlu stated that they produce the products that touch almost every area of life. Corn, sunflower and soybeans produced by the Turkish farmers are converted to high value-added raw materials and intermediate products. Emphasizing that occupational health and safety, which is the main priority in combating the pandemic, are always corporate priorities, Murat Tarakçıoğlu said that: “We paid special attention to the security of the supply chain in order to prevent food shortages in any part of our country during the pandemic period.” Murat Tarakçıoğlu, who pointed out that they continue to achieve their goals despite the pandemic thanks to these factors, to the agile structure they have created with all stakeholders, emphasized that their investments did not slow down during the pandemic period. Murat Tarakçıoğlu gave the following information about the ‘Metamorphosis’ digital transformation program and new IT investments and goals:

“As Cargill Turkey, we are in a period where the digital conversion process is most active, largest investments of infrastructure and training in this area is planned. Both Turkey as well as the Middle East and Africa region take digitization as the basis of our five-year strategy. Digitalization is at the top of the strategic competencies we set to achieve our goals. For this reason, we have been running a digital transformation program called ‘Metamorphosis’ for three years. Our aim is to integrate digital experiences. Thanks to the program, we ensure that reporting and analysis are carried out with the most accurate data and we carry out training activities for our colleagues to gain all the necessary competencies in the digitalization transformation journey.

We became one of the first ‘Food Ingredients and Bioindustry’ business units in Europe within Cargill, which implemented the project within the framework of the ERP modernization program. This project, in the area of digitalization as Cargill Turkey, was our biggest investment in recent years. We had to realize such a large wall-to-wall transition just at the beginning of the pandemic. In fact, we started the transition to the SAP ERP (TC2) system in 2018. We had a few main goals when getting started with ERP modernization. There were three separate ERP programs within our company and they were not integrated with each other. In addition, they were not advanced enough to serve the decision support mechanism. Our data were on Excel files from different sources, calculations were made manually. In order to provide a better service to our customers, we aimed to create a sustainable infrastructure that is more suitable for our global structure, where we can increase visibility in our operations. We aimed to strengthen the connection between a single and common data source and our business units. Rather than a software project, we named this change management project as ‘Metamorphosis’ because it represents the evolution of a caterpillar into a butterfly. It was important that all our colleagues, who are part of the project and whom we call “heroes”, own the project, so we paid attention to the communication of the project. The pandemic started in the most intense phase of the project, which we carried out to change the daily work life of 430 people working in a multinational team. We launched the new system in all locations in March. While struggling with an unexpected pandemic, we tried to implement the new system. During this challenging period of nine weeks, all of our employees demonstrated their skills at the highest level.