Leading US-based company that manufactures pre and finished products for the bakery and baking industry, as well as foodservice. produces food products and distributes bakery supplies and ingredients, including mixes, dough,
toppings, icings, frozen products and ready-to-bake sweets. Clients includes Mrs. Fields, Starbucks, Krispy Kreme and other restaurants, supermarkets and institutional bakeries. Also, manufactures and distributes baking equipment.
Key Facts:
● Founded in 1978.
● Operations in USA, Mexico, Canada, Japan and Europe
● Among the Largest Private Companies in North America
Food Products manufacturer had acquired some similar organizations and also built additional sites to satisfy the demands of a geographically broad customer base. Some of these locations operated on disparate systems and had their custom business processes. Manufacturer embarked on a transformation journey to streamline its operations to manage inventory better, improve customer satisfaction and optimize suppliers. One of the biggest challenges in this journey was the complexity and variation of Master Data across the sites and geographies hindering the ability to consolidate the processes.
As a result, the manufacturer decided to implement Governance for the Master Data as the first step.
The Manufacturer has set up a Master Data Governance processing using SharePoint forms and workflow. Users from 4 different teams have to approve master data. Sometimes they do not fully understand the implications of the data and enter a valid though incorrect base unit of measure causing problems making corrections once a transaction is processed. It currently can take 3-4 days to a new customer into the system. And it has to be keyed manually into SAP bringing its own set of synchronization issues.
The Manufacturer is in the midst of a global rollout of SAP. There are other solutions like JBA, being used for operations. And Legacy ERP solutions being used in multiple geographies that might not switch over to SAP. Also, various integration solutions like SAP Data Services, Informatica are used to keep these systems in sync. Traditional Integration Solutions require teams with varied skill sets to maintain and implement any new functionality or change in business process. Also, Numerous Data issues were resulting in business costs due to surplus or low inventory, thereby impacting the profitability of operations. And in some cases, even understanding the consequences of a planned change became a challenge. Bringing a Master Data Governance solution would provide a perspective and control on the source of an issue and an opportunity to fix it promptly. Also, this would enable the business to incorporate new functionality or rollouts in a more efficient and controlled fashion.
The solution proposed was dataZen (a cloud-based MDM solution) that runs on the ChainSys Smart Data Platform. dataZen comes with prebuilt templates thereby reducing the effort and time involved in implementation. And this also enables the usage of Agile methodology wherein the Business users can participate in the validation of the results very quickly.
dataZen is based on Web-service based architecture and is fully configurable to suit the business needs. Hence validations that were previously maintained in different systems or outside the ERP were quickly consolidated and implemented in dataZen. This improved the business process and reduced the training needs as the screens can be quickly configured based on the user role.
ChainSys resources are familiar with most major ERP solutions. This enabled the team to operate virtually and in a self-sufficient manner thereby reducing the load on the IT team and the Business users.
The implementation of dataZen was done in an agile manner with the first round of testing starting in 3 Weeks. Agile execution is enabled by the use of templates and a configurable and no programming approach to the solution process. With a minimal footprint and virtual team operation, the workload on the ongoing support is also 20% as compared to a traditional implementation.
Manufacturer expects to recover the investment in less than a year based on a reduction in inventory wastage, improved Customer shipment percentage based on ability to produce due to material availability at the right level and Vendor Optimization.
These savings will be generated on an ongoing basis even on future activities whenever new materials or vendors are brought into the system.
Manufacturer will continue to expand the usage of dataZen with the further roll-out costs being 20% of the initial implementation costs. This enables quick to buy-in from the various stakeholders And this includes the reduction in training costs and the decrease of the workload of IT and Business users in the new rollouts. This is also enabled by the flexible integration architecture of dataZen wherein legacy system adapters are built in 2 weeks.
