Aker QRILL knows how to catch more krill. It is spending three billion kroner to grow capacity by half, with a new vessel joining the fleet. The hard part was never the krill. It was whether the roughly seventy people who run the business behind it could absorb fifty percent more volume and complexity without the back office growing to match.
The bet was never about catching more krill
Aker QRILL is the world's largest krill producer. It harvests Antarctic krill and turns it into premium ingredients for human and animal nutrition, sold under the QRILL Aqua and QRILL Pet brands into aquaculture and pet feed. A private-equity-owned carve-out from Aker BioMarine, it employs around 650 people, serves 150 customers in more than 50 countries, and runs the whole onshore operation, all the admin and sales, with about seventy.
Now it is investing three billion kroner to grow capacity by fifty percent, with a new vessel joining the fleet. The catch more krill part it had covered. The real question was the business behind it: order management, procurement, finance, the daily work of turning a harvest into shipments and invoices and answers for customers. Grow that fifty percent the usual way and the cost grows with it.
"We need to scale volume and complexity without scaling headcount and overhead at the same pace."
Webjørn Barstad, CEO, Aker QRILL Company
There are only two usual ways to scale a back office, and both cost too much
The first is to hire. More volume, more people, cost rising in lockstep with growth, which is the one outcome a fifty percent expansion on a fixed budget cannot afford. The second is to commission software, the enterprise way, where a need is identified, joins an IT backlog, gets scoped, and ships eighteen months later into a business that has already moved on. Aker QRILL had run early AI pilots, but none of them had reached production.
So the back office stayed manual, and the manual work was already heavy. Every shipment needed its documents to match, container IDs, product names, invoice values, and the team checked each set by hand, with about one in ten still carrying a mismatch that triggered a customs hold. More than a hundred supplier invoices arrived every month, up to twenty line items each, in several currencies, too complex to verify in-house, so the job had been handed to outside auditors who kept half of every error they found. Order allocation meant juggling PDFs, packaging specs and import rules across scattered systems, where a single decision could generate over a hundred and fifty emails spanning months. Supplier statements covering three hundred invoices at a time mostly went unanswered. It all held together. It would not have held through fifty percent more.
So the people who knew the work built the software
Instead of hiring, and instead of waiting on an eighteen-month build, Aker QRILL took a third path. It brought domain experts from Order Management, Finance, Supply Chain and Operations in from day one, the people who know how the work actually happens, and worked with Riff to turn that knowledge into working applications. The apps run on top of the systems Aker QRILL already uses, the ERP, inventory, email, live FX rates, with role-based access and audit trails built in from the start. Each one shipped in two to three weeks. Eleven were built in three months, five of them already in production and six more on the way.
"We go from business problem to production software in weeks, not months, at a fraction of the cost."
Eyvind Haaland, CIO, Aker QRILL Company
The apps that took the manual work off the team
Each app picked up one piece of the work that used to fill the week, and handed the people back the judgment.
The Shipping Document Verifier took over the document check that used to happen by hand. It scans each set, extracts the key fields, container IDs, product names and invoice values, and flags only the mismatches before anything ships. The one-in-ten mismatch rate is heading toward zero, customs holds are falling, and the team reviews the flagged exceptions instead of reading every page.
The Supplier Invoice Checker replaced hours of manual checking, and an outside auditor with it. It reads each of the hundred-plus monthly invoices, validates the currency conversions against live rates, and verifies the math in about two and a half minutes. It catches roughly 400,000 kroner of errors a year, and where half of every recovery once went to the external auditor, all of it now stays in-house.
The Batch Allocation app took the scramble out of matching orders to stock. It pulls the PO requirements, checks live inventory and applies customer preferences in a single pass, so a decision that once generated more than a hundred and fifty emails over months now comes back as a recommendation, and sales can see stock for themselves without emailing the team.
The Market Intelligence Dashboard gave leadership a live view in place of stale slides. It pulls official industry reports, folds in internal data, and presents real-time dashboards with auto-generated summaries and a built-in chat for follow-up questions, reviewed daily where a manual PowerPoint deck used to arrive already out of date.
Across them all, the shift is the same. The people review the exceptions instead of checking every line, and the time goes to judgment instead of manual work. Customers and suppliers feel it directly, in fewer errors and faster answers.
Scaling the business without scaling the cost
Because a new app now ships in two to three weeks instead of six to eighteen months, the software keeps pace with the business rather than arriving after it has changed. Each app is a building block, and the internal teams own and evolve them, so the reliance on outside vendors keeps shrinking rather than growing.
That is what lets the fifty percent capacity growth land without the back office growing to match. And it is only the start: more than twenty further apps are already in the sandbox. For a company adding half its capacity on close to the same headcount, the gap between shipping in weeks and shipping in quarters is not a convenience. It is the difference between scaling profitably and scaling into a cost crisis.