Enterprise Resource Planning Essential Amid Strong Market Growth

Aligning operations and finance

Over the course of the journey to improve financial insights in particular, Patton deployed an integrated ERP system built for food manufacturing and created a cloud-based data lake. He is now in the process of implementing a system to monitor the movement of raw material as it progresses through the facility to identify waste and improve efficiency.

Ruprecht also needed a robust set of application programming interfaces (APIs) so it could be easily integrated with other systems. Syspro gives Ruprecht capabilities it previously lacked, such as production scheduling, full inventory visibility, and manufacturing standard costing. These capabilities alone have already saved Ruprecht more than $1 million annually.

Patton says the Syspro platform is the best in its class because of its API layer approach. Syspro recognizes that it might not have all the answers on advanced functionality, he says, so it provides the capability for Ruprecht to develop some functions in-house or go to a third-party vendor to integrate some functionalities.

Mike Wojtowicz, director of operations for Ruprecht, speaks of the disconnect he’s experienced in the past between operations and finance because shop floor control initiatives were not aligned with other systems and closed-source ERP systems did not allow for better integration. “We would hit what would be a record-setting day at 80% efficiency—we’re all high-fiving and everyone’s doing a good job, and finance is like, ‘Yeah, you lost $1,000 in labor variance.’ We’re like, ‘Well, how can that be?’” he says. “There’s a disconnect. We can’t be high-fiving on the floor because one module says we’re doing great, and finance goes, ‘Not so great.’ Because at the end of the day, the only scorecard that matters is the financial scorecard. But when you have disconnected systems, it’s very, very difficult to near impossible to tie them together.”

With Syspro, the Ruprecht teams are seeing everything tied together, Wojtowicz says. “So now, if it’s one standard, and those standards feed the bill of materials, and they feed the efficiencies, then if we’re high-fiving, finance should be right there with us high-fiving, or vice versa,” he says.

The change in ERP system will go directly to the bottom line. “Mike’s got a $1.5 million target on his back on labor this year, and he wouldn't have gotten there—he couldn’t get there—without having an understanding of what the standards are, where do I go to look, what technologies do we bring in, that kind of thing,” Patton says. “We haven’t even scratched the surface yet on the scheduling side. And that’s really where we’ll see some benefits because that’ll be a direct input to how he produces on a week-to-week basis. We’re going to be a little bit more intelligent to understand what our capacity is, and how we schedule to make some meaningful decisions from a buying perspective, from a labor content perspective, etc.”

Customer conversations

The sous vide products that Ruprecht provides enable restaurants and other institutions to spend 20 minutes cooking—or even as short as 10 minutes—rather than two or three hours. This has become a very attractive proposition for Ruprecht’s customers, accelerated even more by the COVID-19 pandemic. “We’re seeing an increased demand for our products, just given how the industry is changing, and how the consumer sentiment is changing, and how restaurant operations are changing,” Patton says. “The velocity by which we are asked to do business would have never been supported in the system we had previously.”

Sous vide products enable restaurants and other institutions to spend 20 minutes or less cooking rather than two or three hours.Photo courtesy of RuprechtSyspro’s ERP system is also enabling the food processor to start asking the right questions about pricing and costing. Cooking capacity and thermal capacity are choke points, for example, so need these elements to be factored into more intelligent analysis. “Should we be using that as an allocation of overhead? Should we be using that as a determinant of how this product is priced?” Patton ponders. “We really didn’t look at products differently, we didn’t understand inherent manufacturing differences that exist for a given product. So is a four-bone short rib product equal to a meatloaf? Well, that’s not the case because a four-bone short rib takes more time to produce—you’ve got to cut it, it’s a bone-in product, which means it’s also got to cook longer. So if I'm tying up more of my oven time, then why am I not charging a premium for that product, given the amount of overhead that it has to consume?”

A food-focused ERP system understands these sorts of dynamics and changes the conversation with the customer. “It’s allowed us to understand our margins in a way that we weren’t able to before,” Patton says. “Because we’re able to now assign a more representative value of what that product takes to manufacturing and should and could command in the marketplace.”

More to gain

With a cloud-based data lake for all the data Ruprecht’s operations produce, the processor will continue to get more out of that data as time goes on. This base has enabled more advanced applications that are being deployed, such as raw material tracking throughout the facility, and artificial intelligence that analyzes internal and external data to forecast the price of meat with precision.

Patton has plans for taking Ruprecht further along the digital transformation journey, but he knows that the Syspro ERP system gives him the foundation that he needs to move forward. “We are not where we want to be and need to be from an activity-based costing perspective,” he says. “But at some point in the not-too-distant future, we now at least have the tools by which to start to ask some of those questions.”