Kuumba Made, a prominent manufacturer of natural fragrances, facial care products, and herbal salves with a 45-year legacy, offers a portfolio of approximately 136 products. As the company pursues USDA organic certification, it must adhere to rigorous regulations from the FDA and MoCRA. This push for compliance and growth required a modern, reliable operational foundation. The previous system, used for only three months, proved inadequate, prompting Kuumba Made to seek a solution tailored to the nuances of batch manufacturing.
The Need for an Integrated and Industry-Specific System
Kuumba Made recognized that a generic ERP system was a poor fit for its complex production environment, where raw materials are combined over two or three days to create bulk intermediates and final products. Created multiple operational and compliance risks:
- Failure of Core Manufacturing Needs: The system lacked fundamental necessities for a regulated industry, primarily robust lot tracing. This forced operators to rely on manual, paper-based documentation for regulatory compliance, slowing down processes and increasing the risk of human error.
- Operational Instability: The old technology used static data formats and was built on an older SQL system, making data analysis difficult. More critically, the system was unreliable, often “dying” or getting stuck, sometimes locking an order for six hours.
- Costly Inefficiency: The lack of speed meant the system would “linger for a few seconds” when accessing data during peak business-to-consumer (B2C) sales periods. This instability and poor performance resulted in a loss of six months of operational time (three months of implementation and three months of use) and a direct financial impact on the software’s annual costs.
Why BatchMaster Web ERP
Kuumba Made conducted an extensive evaluation, including reviewing competitors like ECI Deacom. BatchMaster Web ERP emerged as the clear choice because it offered a solution purpose-built for the regulatory requirements of the personal care manufacturing industry.
Industry fit was the paramount factor. “BatchMaster was able to assure us that they know our industry. I was thrilled to see the features in it,” said Abhi Sharma.
Other key reasons for selecting BatchMaster included:
- Integrated Compliance: The system delivers mandatory lot tracing from sales order to raw material, and features direct scale integration via Ethernet, automating regulatory documentation and generating variance analysis reports.
- Cost-Effective Scalability: Unlike competitors who demanded a costly full-package solution, BatchMaster offered a core manufacturing module that connected to existing systems (like QuickBooks). This phased approach made the software more cost-effective and allowed the company to test the system before committing to future modules.
- Mobile Operations: BatchMaster is compatible with handheld mobile scanners (Android), enabling operators to manage the entire process, from releasing an order to filling and packing, directly on the production floor, speeding up the learning curve and centralizing equipment.
- Reliable Data: The system offers a much-improved graphical user interface with the “right level of complexity,” simplifying procurement and recipe management, including the ability to make controlled tweaks to recipes during production.
What’s Ahead
With implementation underway, Kuumba Made is preparing to transition its core operations to BatchMaster. The immediate focus is on digitizing batch creation, quality control, and procurement.
The company anticipates significant benefits:
- Accurate Cost of Goods (COG): The system will accurately track and account for all man-hours and consumable costs (like pipettes and gloves) used in a batch, providing much more accurate numbers for accounting.
- Accelerated Innovation: Kuumba Made plans to explore the R&D module in the next six months to accelerate the pace of new product and recipe experimentation.
- Operational Consolidation: Over time, the company will continue evaluating opportunities to further streamline operations within BatchMaster ERP. This may include exploring ways to enhance alignment between manufacturing and warehouse processes.
“BatchMaster will help us become a smarter, more customer-focused company,” said Sharma. “By choosing an industry-specific solution, Kuumba Made is investing in operational excellence, better decision-making, and a secure platform to support its organic certification goals and continued expansion”.
