Powering Growth: How Sunbelt Custom Mineral Scaled with BatchMaster ERP

July 9, 2026

📚 New Blog Posts

1. Batch Production Best Practices for Process Manufacturers

2. This Month in Process Manufacturing – June 2026

3. The Real Reasons ERP Projects Succeed or Fail

For over three decades, Sunbelt Custom Mineral has manufactured mineral products in a heavily regulated environment where precision, traceability, and consistency are non-negotiable. Implementing BatchMaster ERP in 2019 gave the company the operational discipline needed to manage rapid growth while meeting the compliance demands of its industry.

The Challenge: Manual Processes in a Regulated Environment

As Sunbelt continued to grow, its reliance on QuickBooks, spreadsheets, and manual paperwork created mounting operational limitations.

1. Limited Cost and Production Visibility

Key Takeaways:

Manual cost recalculation limited real-time financial awareness
Formulation costs weren’t automatically linked to ingredient pricing
Leadership often worked from outdated cost information

What Happened: Before implementing BatchMaster, Sunbelt lacked a centralized platform for managing formulation costs and production activity. With ingredient costs constantly fluctuating, keeping finished goods costs accurate required manual recalculation that consumed significant time, leaving leadership working from numbers that were often out of date by the time decisions needed to be made.

2. Regulatory Compliance and Traceability Demands

Key Takeaways:

Regulated manufacturers require precise, ingredient-level traceability
Manual tracking increases compliance and audit risk
Documentation must be immediately accessible during inspections

What Happened: Sunbelt’s regulatory environment demanded thorough record-keeping and ingredient-level traceability. Manual processes made it difficult to consistently capture the level of detail — every ingredient, every batch, every production run — that regulatory agencies require, creating risk during audits and inspections.

3. The Need for a Manufacturing-Specific System

Key Takeaways:

Growing manufacturers outgrow generic accounting and spreadsheet tools
Formula-based production requires purpose-built ERP functionality
Lot traceability and batch-level tracking are non-negotiable in regulated industries

What Happened: Formula-based manufacturing, lot traceability, and batch-level tracking were non-negotiable capabilities given Sunbelt’s operational complexity. As the business approached full plant capacity, the company needed a platform purpose-built for process manufacturing rather than a patchwork of generic tools.

The Solution: BatchMaster ERP

Sunbelt implemented BatchMaster ERP in 2019, giving the company a centralized system to manage formulation costing, lot traceability, ingredient tracking, and batch-level production — built specifically for the demands of regulated, formula-based manufacturing.

“Since we started with BatchMaster, we’ve grown about 30%. That kind of growth would have been really difficult to manage without a system like this,” says Jacob Mazoch, VP, Sunbelt Custom Mineral.

Key Benefits of BatchMaster ERP

Operational Area	Impact of the Right Solution
Real-Time Cost Visibility	Formulation costs are automatically linked to current ingredient pricing, giving Sunbelt accurate finished goods costs without manual recalculation.
Compliance and Audit Readiness	Every ingredient, batch, and production run is captured with the precision regulatory agencies require, keeping documentation audit-ready at all times.
Scalable Operations	The operational infrastructure in place allowed Sunbelt to grow approximately 30% and raise plant utilization from around 50% to 90–95% of capacity without adding proportional administrative overhead.
Streamlined Batch Processing	Manual tracking and reconciliation have been replaced by structured, automated workflows, making batch entry faster and inventory more accurate.

Operational Impact

Since implementing BatchMaster ERP, Sunbelt Custom Mineral has significantly strengthened its operational foundation. The company can now:

Access accurate, real-time finished goods costing
Maintain complete ingredient and batch traceability
Respond quickly and confidently to regulatory inspections
Manage production and inventory within a single, centralized system
Absorb substantial growth without proportional increases in administrative overhead

By replacing manual processes with a dedicated manufacturing platform, Sunbelt strengthened operational consistency while reducing the risks associated with disconnected tracking methods.

Advice for Other Manufacturers

Based on Sunbelt’s experience, several lessons stand out for manufacturers evaluating ERP adoption:

Choose a Manufacturing-Specific ERP Formula-based manufacturers require functionality designed specifically for process manufacturing, including lot traceability, ingredient tracking, and batch management.

Prioritize Real-Time Cost Visibility Automatically linking formulation costs to current ingredient pricing removes the burden of manual recalculation and keeps decision-making grounded in accurate numbers.

Build Compliance Into the System, Not Around It The ability to capture ingredient- and batch-level detail as a natural part of daily operations — rather than as a separate manual effort — is essential for audit and recall readiness.

Plan for Scale Early The right operational infrastructure allows a manufacturer to absorb significant growth without a proportional increase in administrative overhead.

Looking Ahead: BatchMaster ERP with SAP Business One

With plant utilization now running at 90–95% of capacity and the business continuing to grow, Sunbelt saw an opportunity to unify its operations even further — bringing manufacturing, formulations, and financials together under a single system for a complete, real-time picture of the business.

To find the right path forward, Sunbelt evaluated several alternatives, including Aptean (built on Microsoft Business Central) and NetSuite. The evaluation was thorough, involving multiple demos, detailed walkthroughs of specific pain points, and honest conversations about what each transition would require. Ultimately, several factors shaped the decision to move forward with BatchMaster ERP with SAP Business One:

Continuity over disruption: After years on BatchMaster, the team already understood the workflows and terminology. Staying within the same ecosystem made the upgrade path significantly less disruptive than starting over with an unfamiliar system.
On-premise deployment: Cloud-only solutions, including NetSuite, were eliminated early in the process. Sunbelt required on-premise installation for greater control over data and tighter integration with existing local tools and processes.
Unified financials: The primary driver for the upgrade was bringing all business costs — production and non-production alike — into one system. The new platform needed to handle both manufacturing depth and financial breadth without compromise.
Proven manufacturing fit: Formula-based manufacturing, lot traceability, and batch-level tracking remained non-negotiable capabilities, and BatchMaster’s track record with Sunbelt’s operations gave the team confidence that BatchMaster ERP with SAP Business One would extend rather than replace what already worked.

With a core team already fluent in BatchMaster’s manufacturing workflows, the transition to BatchMaster ERP with SAP Business One is expected to be manageable rather than disruptive — eliminating the remaining friction between systems and giving Sunbelt a complete, real-time picture of business performance.

Conclusion

Sunbelt Custom Mineral’s transition from manual, disconnected processes to BatchMaster ERP demonstrates how the right manufacturing platform can power sustained growth in a regulated industry. For a company running at 90–95% of plant capacity and planning its next chapter of growth, the path forward with BatchMaster ERP with SAP Business One is clear: a single system, a complete picture, and the operational discipline to scale confidently.