Montego Pet Nutrition

Montego Pet Nutrition, the largest independent pet nutrition manufacturer in South Africa, struggled with a highly customized system that prevented them from being agile enough to respond to market changes with ease. With Sana Commerce, they identified a solution that streamlined workflow processes and provided a better experience for their customers.

22+ years experience in pet nutrition
4 distribution centers across South Africa
Exports to 17 countries globally
2,500+ active customers

71%

sales generated through web store

Strategic supply chain partner relationships

Reduced time

from 2 days to minutes for price updates

32%

reduced TCO

The challenge

Legacy, custom-built tooling that was time-consuming and unscalable

Previously, Montego Pet Nutrition was running on a legacy system that used an outdated financial transaction system. Their B2B platform was custom-developed and hosted by a third-party system, creating integration issues on a daily basis. As a result, data was not consistently shown in real-time and updates were always a hassle since they required coordination with their third-party provider.

Montego Pet Nutrition Sana Commerce case study - Image of Montego building

Another major challenge was cost. With a custom-built solution, upgrades were rare, and when they were scoped, turned out to be costly for the organization. Montego’s marketing team would have to plan and budget in advance for simple banner or promotion changes, driving up costs of making simple changes to their web store.

Making simple changes was not only costly, but time-consuming as well. For example, price updates took up to 3 days because updates first needed to be made in the financial system and then manually replicated in the web store.

With a small IT department acting as the middleman between finance teams and third-party providers, it was impossible to respond quickly to changes in a market that required aggressive pricing strategies and put strain on everyone involved.

Our founding director, Johan van Jaarsveld’s motto is: ‘The customer is king.’ For us to be able to deliver products as quickly as possible with quality in mind to our customers is very important. The only way you can really do this is to know what stock you’ve got on hand.

Willem Pretorius, IT Manager, Montego Pet Nutrition

The solution

An integrated e-commerce solution that provides real-time updates

Legacy tooling with a custom B2B solution meant Montego was looking for a complete rehaul to strengthen their web store. With the decision to implement Microsoft Dynamics F&O, Sana Commerce Cloud was recommended as a natural choice for integrated e-commerce.

Sana Commerce Cloud’s native e-commerce integration with the ERP meant preparing the master data for the project was a streamlined, one step process. A seamless setup process meant the team felt primed for success from the very beginning.

Primary goals for Montego’s new e-commerce site:

Reduce TCO: It was important for Willem that the team could save time and resources with their new tooling, and that changes could be made easily and without factoring in any extra cost.
Easy-to-use: Internal stakeholders such as Montego’s finance and marketing teams would need to be able to use their e-commerce platform with ease.
Better insights: Since their previous web store was hosted by a third-party provider, Montego had no visibility on how their customers interacted with the web store. They wanted a better overview of customer behavior for insights that reveal exactly where marketing or promotional budget is best allocated to incentivize more orders.

The results

A B2B web store that empowers internal teams and customers alike

With the support of an ERP-integrated web store, changes that once required three teams and multiple days now take a single person and a few minutes. Montego Pet Nutrition went live with their new Sana Commerce Cloud store about a year ago and have so far seen great results:

Streamlined work processes: Teams are able to create new customer accounts and manage price updates at a fraction of the time it used to take to maintain the web store. With the Finance team now responsible for these tasks, IT is able to focus on more tech-focused work and are no longer the middleman for minor updates.

Montego Pet Nutrition Sana Commerce case study - quote image challenge

Reduced TCO: Not only was Montego able to distribute work more efficiently across their internal teams, they also reduced their TCO by 32% due to the ERP integrated platform. Plus, they now have more budget to spend on revenue-generating activities, like promoting their web store.
Stronger customer insights and experiences: With new visibility over customer activity on their web store, Montego is now able to track orders, shipments, and empower customers to handle returns with ease.

Looking ahead, the organization wants to strengthen adoption efforts to increase sales on their web store by 20%. They also have goals to scale so that they can serve internationally based customers. Listen to Willem talk to Arno Ham, our Chief Product Officer, about how working with Sana Commerce empower Montego Pet Nutrition to serve their customers better.

In the past, IT was the sole department working on our [e-commerce] platform. Now, we’ve exposed that to our customer relationship management department, our marketing department and our data department. All of us have got a role within Sana Commerce. It’s not just an IT system anymore, it’s a tool for the whole business, making operations much easier.

Willem Pretorius, IT Manager, Montego Pet Nutrition