Business is booming for Bar Bakers a niche private label manufacturer in Los Alamitos, California focusing on a variety of baked and cold process cookies, wafers and nutritional bars and manufacturing for major retailers, large brands and small companies. The company has blended its skilled leadership, premium R&D services and BatchMaster ERP with SAP Business One together as its main recipe for success. These elements are working together as Bar Bakers experiences exponential growth. Though the company is fairly new, there is over 200 years of combined managerial and engineering industry experience within Bar Bakers and the team understood that employing industry sepcific ERP Software for nutritional bars would not only fit their requirements, it would be their ‘Icing on the Cake’ or in their case ‘Icing on the Bar’.
BatchMaster ERP directs the Processes and Bar Bakers reaps the Rewards
Christian Jones, Bar Baker Purchaser & ERP Administrator, shared that since the company was new, they were able to align their operations with BatchMaster ERP from the start. “The entire flow of Inventory, from Work Order and Demand to Purchasing, Receiving, A/P and material consumption is all being managed within BatchMaster ERP. We are using BatchMaster’s Material Requirements Planning to its full extent with Purchasing using the demand calculated from the program.” Jones adds, “Inventory management is an area where we’ve experienced a big return on investment. We can keep a lower level inventory for most items due to our ability to see what the real demand is.”
Rapid Lot Number Traceability is a Crucial Benefit
“An absolutely crucial benefit that BatchMaster ERP provides is lot number traceability,” shared Jones, noting that Bar Bakers has major commitments to food safety and is currently working towards a BRC food safety certification. The system’s lot management capabilities will enable Bar Bakers to quickly and easily comply with BRC’s product traceability and lot recall codes. “We’ve found using BatchMaster for our mock recalls that we can respond to bidirectional lot traceability requirements in under 15 minutes, though the audit gives us 2 hours. And that includes all details of where finished goods were used and to whom they were shipped,” commented Jones.
Document Management provides Organizational Transparency
“Another huge advantage to us is Document Management throughout BatchMaster ERP,” Jones attested. “We didn’t realize at first how significantly BatchMaster ERP would deliver in this area.” Jones says one example of this would be that ingredient specifications are loaded into the solution so anyone required to access this information can easily do that. He also mentioned that they scan in hard copies of documents for all their transactions, such as Bills of Lading. “If there is ever any discrepancy, we can review all the documents for the transaction. BatchMaster ERP has provided transparency across the company,” Jones asserted.
Train the Trainer and Test Environment Speeds User Adoption
Bar Bakers commitment to learning the new ERP solution was demonstrated by having Jones became their in-house product expert. “I had excellent training from our BatchMaster ERP consulting team and the consultants transferred product knowledge with extensive training sessions,” shared Jones.
“In addition, we had a test environment set up for staff as they learned BatchMaster ERP. They could enter data into this environment, and I was available as the ‘company expert’ if they had questions. Though most of our staff were quick learners, it was a great setup as we were getting started with the system.”
Achieving Rapid Growth with BatchMaster ERP
Bar Bakers has been growing at a rapid pace and is expecting to add several new customers in the next few months. “As a private label manufacturer with a dedicated focus on product development, we’ve helped customers who were producing very small batches in their garage to now manufacturing half a million bars within a month. Without BatchMaster ERP this would not be possible,” summarized Jones.
