Aptean Food & Beverage ERP Case Study: Creative Food Ingredients

Founded in the mid-1990’s, Creative Food Ingredients is an innovative manufacturer, producing and selling a variety of cookie products from its commercial bakery in upstate New York.

Executive Director of Supply Chain, Rodney Smith, shares his experience on the challenges of working in silos and how implementing Aptean’s food and beverage specific enterprise resource planning (ERP) software connected the company’s departments and improved operations.

The Challenge

Prior to selecting Aptean’s bakery ERP, Creative Foods worked in many silos. Smith noted, “Everyone worked within their own department, and there was limited sharing of information with the rest of the company.”

This lack of transparency resulted in a complete disconnect between the company’s finance and production departments. “We were using an inferior and outdated accounting system before switching to an ERP,” says Smith. “There was limited bill of material functionality and not a lot of structure there. We were putting data into the system 24 hours later, so we had an issue with real-time inventory. Our procurement team was waiting almost a full day before even knowing what was used.”

• Limited sharing of information and poor transparency

• Inventory and traceability issues

• Reliance on disparate departmental data to track products throughout the warehouse

• Completing basic traceability exercise would take up to four hours

As a result of these issues, Smith had one goal in mind when upgrading the company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system: departmental transparency.

The Solution

As well as resolving visibility and transparency issues, Creative Foods wanted to upgrade its ERP system to a more user-friendly platform that included accounting and production integration.

With this combination of requirements in mind Creative Foods chose Aptean Food & Beverage ERP—a proven platform designed to solve common food industry challenges including traceability, safety, supply chain visibility, forecasting and more.

Creative Foods also decided to leverage Aptean Plant Floor, warehouse management system (WMS) and manufacturing execution system (MES) modules to enhance real-time visibility of production processes.

With the help of Aptean, the Creative Foods team has been able to break down data silos to create more fluid workflows across the entire organization. “With Aptean Food & Beverage ERP, everyone has access to this data,” Smith commented. “There’s transparency now from R&D when a project starts, all the way until its actual implementation of finished goods. Those have been huge changes for us.”

The Results

With a food and beverage specific ERP, Creative Foods now has a unified system that connects departments, data and processes. This means the organization has been able to:

• Gain real-time visibility into inventory data, decreasing shortages and increasing order efficiency

• Break down data silos for full transparency between departments

• Greatly improve the time it takes to perform traceability exercises (from four hours to 30 minutes)

For Creative Food’s procurement team, the benefits were huge. “We were now able to react quickly to shortages and also to where inventory was used incorrectly,” Smith commented. “We also have access to real-time inventory data, so if a customer calls and needs an order, we know if we have that inventory and whether we can ship it to them.”

Aptean Food ERP: Features for Your Industry Baked In

With variable raw ingredients, allergens, expiration dates and complex supply chains, your bakery has a lot of critical data to manage and important workflows to follow—so you can delight customers, manage costs and maintain compliance. To take the hassle out of your day-to-day operation and help you drive profitability you need a specialized solution for bakery operations.

Enter Aptean Food & Beverage ERP. The tailored features of our bakery ERP help you manage bi-directional traceability, allergen management, costing, quality and compliance, and recipe management. And what’s more, our solutions are backed by dedicated in-house teams, so you can benefit from tailored best practice advice and by-your-side support throughout your entire journey with us.

Ready to remove silos, streamline processes and drive growth in your bakery business? Request a demo to see the software in action and discover how your business can unlock measurable benefits straight out of the gate. Or, if you’re ready to get started, request a no obligation quote.