Source: Botica Butler Raudon
Zespri sets a new industry benchmark for speed, accuracy, and customer trust
NEW ZEALAND, Auckland – 12 January 2026 – SAP today announced that Zespri, the world’s largest marketer of premium-quality kiwifruit, has strengthened its commitment to trust and customer service by launching a fully digitised, customer-first claims platform built on SAP’s integrated cloud technologies. As a result, today, customers benefit from a simple self-service claims process that resolves issues in seconds, while smart automation helps Zespri’s teams deliver fast, consistent outcomes without compromising on quality or control.
While accounting for only one percent of sales, with the company facing more than 40,000 quality claims a year – totaling over NZD $70 million – Zespri wanted to reimage its claims process. Previously slow, manual, and at times, associated with inconsistent decision making – today, new digital tools deliver an intuitive, self-service experience through a centralised claims portal, allowing multi-delivery claims to be created in under 30 seconds, and more than 1,000 deliveries can be processed in under two minutes.
“By combining intelligent automation with human expertise, we’ve built a platform that reinforces our brand promise and sets a new industry standard for service,” said Rahul Badge, Head of In-Market Supply Chain at Zespri. “As a result, we have been able to meet our customers’ need for a simpler, faster, and more transparent experience, and give our assessors the tools to reduce manual input and share expert insights across the business. We now see each claim as a chance to show our commitment to service, quality and openness.”
This transformation has rapidly improved Zespri’s claims process, with 80 percent of claims now benefiting from human-in-the-loop automated recommendations and decision making. This has significantly reduced processing times and errors and freed assessors to focus on complex cases while maintaining Zespri’s strict audit requirements. The new platform also delivers comprehensive, real-time insights, supporting end-to-end visibility throughout Zespri’s global supply chain and unlocking opportunities for preventative action and continuous improvement.
“Zespri has set a new benchmark for customer-centric innovation in the fresh produce industry,” said Adrian Griffin, Managing Director, SAP New Zealand. “By digitising and scaling expert decision-making, Zespri is driving both operational efficiency and customer trust, strengthening its position as a global leader and delivering real value across its network.”
Leveraging SAP Commerce Cloud as the central customer interface, Zespri introduced a seamless digital journey that enables claims to be submitted across multiple deliveries in under 30 seconds. Real-time supply chain data from SAP S/4HANA, integrated with partner solutions, eliminates the need for repetitive data entry and helps prevent human error, while an advanced orchestration layer powered by SAP BTP, alongside partner solutions, automates the application of business rules and embeds human expertise at scale. The introduction of SAP Fiori applications equips Zespri’s assessors to review end-to-end supply chain data and quality inspection reports from partner solutions, keeping expert judgement central to complex claim assessments.
The claims platform, delivered in partnership with Accenture New Zealand and FAIR Consulting Group, is now live across major markets including Japan, China, Korea, Singapore, Vietnam, India, the United States and Europe. Business users have embraced the solution, with senior leaders describing it as “the most business-centric digital project Zespri has ever run.”
Pete Devereux, Accenture Business Architecture Manager, said, “We set out to make things simpler for everyone. The new system is easy to use and gets claims sorted more quickly, which is good news for both customers and Zespri’s teams.”
Christiaan Du Plessis, SAP & Cloud Director at FAIR Consulting Group, added, “It’s been a real pleasure working together. The impact for customers is already obvious, and we’re excited to keep building from here.”
As a result of digitising its claims process and unlocking richer, end-to-end data, Zespri is now positioned to leverage next-generation technologies, including predictive analytics and computer vision, further advancing its goals around quality, sustainability, and customer experience.
About SAP
As a global leader in enterprise applications and business AI, SAP (NYSE:SAP) stands at the nexus of business and technology. For over 50 years, organizations have trusted SAP to bring out their best by uniting business-critical operations spanning finance, procurement, HR, supply chain, and customer experience. For more information, visit www.sap.com.
