Global aquaculture feed producer uses Microsoft Project to gain efficiencies, improve collaboration

BioMar is in the business of aquaculture. Headquartered in Denmark, the company sustainably produces high-performance aquaculture feed for more than 45 fish and shrimp species. Making aquaculture feed pellets requires complex science, ensuring ingredients meet strict requirements, such as securing optimized performance of the fish/shrimp, complying with environmental conditions, ensuring the best possible fish and shrimp welfare, and focusing on a sustainable use of the raw materials.

At BioMar, three departments collaborate on new product development in an engagement called the Product Innovation Process. From around the world, customer-focused technical departments initiate the Product Innovation Process together with researchers by creating product cases. The global research and development (R&D) group then sets up the projects. After the research phase has been completed in one of the global Aquaculture Trial Units, the projects are then handed off to the BioFarm team. The BioFarm team conducts tests and trials of fish and shrimp at its Aquaculture Technology Centers and at customer facilities to ensure the research results from the controlled conditions can be replicated with equal success at the customer sites.

The three groups relied on a system called BioNet (built on SharePoint 2010) as their documentation management platform and used it for light project management tasks. However, during the last decade, BioMar has grown fast and updated the ways it organizes its research and product management processes. BioNet and SharePoint 2010 couldn’t keep up with its users’ needs and BioMar’s evolution and the organization sought a change.

BioMar wanted more flexibility

Organization is a key component to scientific work because there’s so much information to manage and track—all vital to securing solid research results and hence customer success. “Scientists love driving knowledge, learning new things. Most hate doing admin stuff,” says Kristine Langaunet, Head of Product Marketing, Salmon Division, BioMar. “R&D used much of their time in a system that wasn’t meeting their needs,” she adds.

The goals were to sharply reduce manual tasks and possible inaccuracies while offering an overview of BioMar’s portfolio of projects. Tracking financials, resource utilization, status, and KPIs was difficult. Overseeing the development of new products from idea to product release required a lot of clicking to get all the details. Siloed solutions for different stakeholders resulted in duplicate work, less-than-ideal collaboration, and not enough knowledge sharing. And ultimately, keeping business-critical data in a system on its way to being outdated was risky.

“Our former product management system was no longer able to cope with the complexity of a global product pipeline. We simply had to invest in a future-proof project management solution,“ says Thomas Bøen, IT Business Partner, BioMar.

Deciding on a solution

BioMar was already working with Microsoft technology implementation partner Fellowmind on another project. Keeping with its IT strategy, BioMar wanted to align this solution with successful technology already in use at the company. It met with Fellowmind to discuss its requirements for the new project management platform, including out-of-the-box flexibility that didn’t rely on customizations. The process started with a discovery phase, which included a thorough analysis of the current state of the existing solution as well as envisioning what the future could look like with a new solution. The analysis resulted in a recommendation to build a solution that used Microsoft Project.

BioMar and Fellowmind partnered and began building the solution that would replace the existing one on BioNet at the start of 2023, naming the new platform the Innovation Portal. It is currently deployed in production with an expanded roll-out across the company coming later this year. “We hope our efficiency will be tremendously improved because it’s at the heart of how we organize our research and development program,” says Langaunet.

The Innovation Portal is based on Microsoft 365. It uses Microsoft Power Platform to integrate and move data from one step to the next in the product development processes. Workflows are automated using Microsoft Power Automate. Part of the solution incorporates a model-driven monitoring application built on Microsoft Power Apps (data is pulled in from Microsoft Dataverse). Microsoft Project organizes all the R&D projects and creates the project portfolio overview of BioMar’s R&D research activities, while Microsoft Power BI dashboards are used for reporting. Microsoft Teams replaces Skype as the real-time messaging application among stakeholders involved in the product development process.

“We haven’t done any custom development. We combined and configured Microsoft technologies in a way that matches the work processes at BioMar,” says Boris Reinholth Nyland, Director, Fellowmind.

Strengthening collaboration and product development

The Innovation Portal will aid scientists and product managers in collaboration, communication, information sharing, and efficiently managing projects. The former solution lacked good visualization dashboards (now remedied with Power BI). With Project and its overview capabilities, BioMar staff can now see the relationship between the product development program and R&D projects.

Initial users have praised the Timeline feature in Project as well as the illustrated task list and ability to link tasks. “This capability wasn’t available in our old project management system,” says Bøen.

“Now, we can have a dashboard. We can split the data. We can view it on a global level. I can view the information for all business units or I can filter it only on my division. It automatically displays all of the product development programs that are currently running,” says Langaunet. “We can also see the health of the related projects to that specific development program, so you’ll get that specificity, like traffic lights; it’s easy to understand where it is that we need to focus our efforts (green ones are fine; let’s look at the yellow or red ones that indicate that something within the related project deliverables is not going according to plan),” she adds.

This provides BioMar with a much more targeted approach in its overall, ongoing product development processes. These details are now also linked to both financials and staffing because they’re equally important.

Looking toward the future

BioMar is expecting the new system to speed up time to market. This also aligns with other organizational changes that the group has undertaken to improve its product development process. “The benefits of this new project management solution will also impact cross-functional collaboration and transparency,” says Langaunet. 

The project portfolio management solution is part of BioMar’s overall strategy and aligns with the company’s sustainability targets. “All the world’s resources are becoming more and more scarce. This project will be an important support and enabler for us to fulfill our sustainability ambitions,” says Langaunet. 

According to Nyland, BioMar’s decision to use Microsoft Project was based in part on its confidence in the long-term vision and strategy of the Microsoft Cloud. “BioMar’s journey to a modern project and portfolio management solution is just beginning,” he said. 

Nyland adds, “This project is part of BioMar’s journey to fully utilize the advantage of being a data-driven company, benefitting from all the data that BioMar gathers through its processes and all the knowledge retrieved through trial data on Biomar products from the fish and shrimp farmers.”