How to Reduce Supply Chain Complexity with these Case Studies

How customers get the products they want when they want it is an issue that all companies face. Reducing supply chain complexity often means looking within.

Here’s how three companies are trying to do just that.

Bleach Fine Foods reclaims ERP to Reduce Supply Chain Complexity with these Case Studies
Blount Fine Foods Corp. Is a soup and sauce maker based in Fall River, Mass.

The company’s customers include grocery store chains, food service distributors and other vendors selling soup to consumers, said Mike Backes, director of enterprise information systems at Blount. The soups are sold throughout the US under the Blount, Legal Sea Foods and Panera Bread brands.

Today, Blount’s technology team is transforming its information systems, including re-implementing the Sage X3 to leverage the platform’s supply chain and logistics facilities to reduce supply chain complexity. Blount implemented the Sage X3 in 2005, a system designed specifically for process manufacturers to handle its growing business.

Before Blount’s technology team began the implementation project, the company had more than 100 access databases all integrated with “Spider-Webbed” and the Sage X3, Backus said.

Blaus said that soon Sage will use modules planning the material requirements to better manage what products it needs to make, what raw materials it needs to buy and where the company needs to ship the products And at the same time a lot of labor needs to be cut in labor, Backus said. .

“We want to use sage to reduce waste, get the right order quantity, get the right minimum stock on hand, and reduce deductions when we are not able to fully ship customer orders Maybe – maybe that’s why we don’t have enough product on hand, for example, “he said.

The company also plans to add some new functionality, including adding Sage X3’s customer relationship management module, and a new electronic data interchange system.

“We are trying to be more personal with customers and want more information about their needs and make our business more efficient,” Backes said.

The Wenger Group uses ECM to streamline its supply chain

Reims, Penn., Based in the Wenger Group, is a 75-year-old, family-owned manufacturer of poultry, pork and dairy feed and ingredients. The company also provides egg and egg marketing, flock services, and pullets grown in the under-Atlantic region.
The Wenger Group operates eight milling locations in Pennsylvania and eight in Maryland.

A supply chain challenge the Wenger Group faced: its legacy paper-based processes cannot continuously capture operational data in a timely manner.

Paper records produced from their manufacturing processes were stored in various physical locations, limiting access to documents, said Michel Lombardo Smith, LaserFichia business analyst at The Wenger Group.

In 2015, the Wenger Group decided to deploy an enterprise content management (ECM) system with a workflow component to streamline its supply chain by automating some of its processes and capturing data associated with its processes. The following year, Wenger moved from paper-based digital document management using Laserfitch’s ECM system.

“The importance behind automation is audit trail, tracking, automated approvals, report generation and data collection that we can get out of Laserfiche that we didn’t have in the manual process,” Lombardo said.

The Wenger Group uses the functionality of the workflow and electronic forms of Laserfiche’s ECM system to capture all of its key documents into an electronic repository. These documents include its safety data sheets that provide a list of chemicals in the company’s mills as well as ingredients used in animal feeds. That information is now automatically recorded at appropriate mills and electronically, making it easy to detect.

Lombardo said that in the past, the company had manually updated security data sheets in the binders at each of its locations.

“We had to be able to provide those safety data sheets [as required by law], and it was quite labor intensive,” she said. “Now we can identify location by chemicals as well as different levels of ingredients, so we can easily identify where we might have something to miss on a particular object.”

The Wenger Group has realized other benefits from automating its documentation, including increasing customer satisfaction and reducing staff time.

For example, scanning and processing delivery tickets within one day of delivery has enabled the company to reduce its invoice processing time from six hours to three, Lombardo said. And the company was able to increase its customer goodwill because it had fewer invoice errors.

Although the Wenger Group is not currently using any equipment outside of Laserfiche to streamline its supply chain, the company plans to implement a new ERP system.

“We want to move our ERP to the cloud because we’re finally moving into an Office 365 environment,” she said. “We are going to expand our portfolio so that we can be more disaster-resistant and recover more quickly.”
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Perfectly Posh focuses on an agile supply chain

Located in Salt Lake City, Perfect Posh is an 8-year-old skincare company that delivers products to its group of protesters who then host in-house or online parties, attend vendor events, host fundraisers, or own Websites that sell online with self. The company also conducts direct sales to consumers on its website.

Fully poses what it calls naturally based pampering and self-care products, including soaps, hand and face creams, face washes and body scrubs.

“We strive to allow people to buy our products or market our goods any way that they choose,” explained Jonee Woodard, the organization’s COO.

By way of instance clients might want to purchase direct, purchase wholesale to market or be the third party e-commerce businesses.

So, however, is that mathematically Posh must get a very agile supply chain to receive its goods to its clients in addition to function in a really effective method to process all of orders in real time,” she explained.

A number of the organization’s orders are extremely big, possibly million dollar retail orders, while some are just single-unit orders, Woodard said. However, either way, the business must process them efficiently and economically. And that is where NetSuite comes from an ERP perspective and also an order processing standpoint,” she explained.

“And, what’s more, by a plug-and-play perspective where I could plug in best practice tools at front, like our Salesforce e-commerce site, along with the rear end that NetSuite performs effortlessly with,” she explained. “NetSuite also plays well with all our proprietary order management system”

On the side, mathematically Posh uses Domo because its business analytics application, which resides in with NetSuite, Woodard said. On the satisfaction side, Perfectly Posh’s third-party provider, VisibleSCM, is additionally able to plug into NetSuite.

“We pass on orders to Visible and they send them exceptionally efficiently and they then stream the trade details back to us, and we subsequently send our clients,” Woodard said.

It is absolutely crucial that every one these tools function instantly and transmit to NetSuite since there is not time to download or upload orders or download or upload buy orders or determine stock, Woodard said.

“NetSuite is the backbone and soul of the whole organization that allows us understand where the product is in the buy order all of the way to the final-mile delivery when it’s been delivered to the customer,” Woodard said.

Before wholeheartedly implemented NetSuite at 2016, it had been running its own supply chain future operations onto a hodgepodge of different instruments that didn’t work nicely together, she explained.

Besides working with the organization’s other distribution chain programs, NetSuite fit the charge to get Perfectly Posh since it had been best in class concerning stability, scalability and the consumer experience, based on Woodard.