Summary
What do you do? Describe your company.
Sakata Seed America, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Sakata Seed Corporation located in Yokohama, Japan. Sakata Seed America, Inc. is headquartered in Morgan Hill, California and breeds, produces and sells hybrid and open pollinated vegetable and ornamental genetics through seeds and cuttings to wholesale distributors. Sakata Seed Corporation has been in business for more than 100 years, and Sakata Seed America more than 40 years. Sakata is the largest global breeder, producer, and wholesaler of broccoli seed, and breeds, produces and sells tomato, pepper, carrot, beet, melon, watermelon, spinach seeds and more. Sakata is highly recognized for its acclaimed Sunpatiens®, and also pansy, calibrachoa, celosia, begonia, gerbera, osteospermum, and many more ornamental products.
Challenge
What was your problem, and what challenges prevented you from easily solving the problem?
Prior to implementing BPA Quality, we had multiple homegrown document management file systems that incorporated distinct manual ways of working to maintain and manage our Quality Management System (QMS) for (3) regulatory compliance initiatives that spans various Business locations. The QMS regulatory compliance stakeholders approached our team to identify an all-in-one digital QMS solution that supports our requirements that include Document Management, Compliance Management, Audit Management, and Risk Management.
How did you find out about our solution? Did you consider other providers? What criteria did you use to select BPA and Microsoft?
The QMS solution landscape was wide open for us. Do we go with a standalone client/server QMS solution? Do we want to explore an ERP add-on solution? After interviewing our QMS User Community, we learned that the all of the team members were familiar with SharePoint (our intranet and document libraries). We focused our search to identify QMS solutions that leverages SharePoint. The search turned up a couple of qualified SharePoint QMS solutions. We actually learned about BPA Quality by querying a potential QMS solution provider by asking them to identify a few of their primary competitors.
We evaluated each solution provider based on supported platform (SharePoint 2013, 2016, Online) and out-of-the-box functionality (Document Management, Audit Management, Training Management, CAPA, Non-Conformance, Accounts, Contacts, and Risk Management). BPA Solutions was the clear decision choice as voted in by our QMS regulatory compliance stakeholders and infrastructure team.
What was the solution? How did it address your challenges?
We took this opportunity to review and align the (3) QMS regulatory compliance initiatives and their associated manual ways of working to utilize the same set of BPA Quality modules. We now have a single set of working instructions for managing our these QMS regulatory compliance initiatives.
Strategy
Why did the team decide to migrate over to 0365?
Migrating BPA Quality from SharePoint 2013 to Office 365 was the final phase of our SharePoint 2010 and 2013 Farm Migration Project.
Was this process easy with BPA’s guidance ? How did you implement the solution? How long did it take? What new challenges did the implementation create?
We leveraged the expertise of our SharePoint Business Solutions Provider, Compass 365 (compass365.com), based in California to lead our BPA Migration Project from SharePoint 2013 to Office 365. BPA provided guidance every step of the way.
The BPA Migration Project took us four months to complete. We successfully migrated (16) unique BPA applications, (25) Nintex Workflows and (3) Nintex Component Workflows. The majority of the migration effort was spent on refactoring the Nintex Workflows (Onprem vs Office 365 Actions and Site Workflows vs. Component Workflows).
Results
What results did you gain from BPA Solutions – both anecdotally and measurably?
Our Company CEO notes, “[Sakata Seed America, Inc.,] management have made a commitment to improving the key processes at the core of our business. To that end, over the past year we have made significant investments in resources, including staff, consulting expertise and applications, all intended to advance our Quality Management Systems, or QMS.
Our business is growing, along with complexity and risk. Our focus on QMS is intended to enable improved risk management, higher levels of efficiency and overall improved financial results.”
Our BPA Quality implementation was designed with a focus on audit management. The QMS regulatory compliance stakeholders are now able to efficiently navigate an Audit by quickly locating requested compliance documents, linked tasks/actions, associated attachments, and any other requested items/materials.
Was there anything spectacular about how easy it was to deploy, or engage employees?
We have branded our BPA Quality implementation as QRS, in reference to our Corporate Motto, “Quality, Reliability, and Service.” QRS (BPA Quality) is the cornerstone for our Organization. BPA Quality is our QMS Platform and Core Business Process Application Engine.
When asked, “What is BPA Quality?”, I use the analogy that BPA Quality is my all-purpose no-code box of “Lego bricks.” We originally implemented BPA Quality to support (3) QMS regulatory compliance initiatives. We often get asked, “Can you make a QRS application for my business process?” Depending on the requirements and complexity, we can quickly construct a “Lego brick” application from start to finish in a matter of hours or days.
User Community adoption and engagement was seamless. We implemented a URL redirect that renders a QRS Microsoft Teams Channel. We deployed QRS in a Microsoft Teams channel (website tab). We utilized the Posts tab as an all-purpose communication tool (general Q&A, community forum, usage tips/tricks, etc.). The Files tab serves as a general how-to documents repository.
