Efficiency, Innovation, and Growth: How a Food Manufacturer's ERP Scoping Led to Success

We were engaged by a food manufacturing company which was experiencing slowdowns and inaccurate reporting due to limitations with the existing ERP solution. The existing ERP had a limited footprint and was struggling against the complexities of business and not integrating the manufacturing and operations processes.

The financial reporting and budgeting functions were done outside of the ERP and with limited information in the ERP, reporting needs were being fulfilled on an ad hoc basis by building custom reports in Business Intelligence tool, Qliksense, which was proving to be expensive to build and maintain. This led to data silos, redundant tasks, and manual processes, leading to inefficiency and productivity losses.

We started with identifying and documenting the key business AS-IS processes as they currently existed within each functional area. We conducted a series of preliminary workshops with key stakeholders to explore, “What’s working, what’s not working, and where do we need to improve?”.

This was a crucial part of the process where we obtained validation and feedback for our work. It involved a significant investment of focus, effort, and time to ensure that the output met standards or requirements.

Seeking validation and feedback is essential for ensuring that the work is on the right track, meets objectives, and resonates with the intended audience or stakeholders. We were able to gather valuable insights, identify areas for improvement and worked with the stakeholders to build a target state for some of the key business processes.

We then conducted deep dives with the existing ERP vendor to identify if the current ERP would be able to meet the demands of the organisation in its current form and what customisations, if any, would be required to achieve these. We also got the timelines and effort required (time and financials) to achieve this.

We did an assessment of the organisations Financial and ERP Software Options and checked the degree of compliance of the existing and potential ERP packages with our previously developed process maps.

Armed with this vital information, we also led efforts for identifying potential ERP replacement offerings. We prepared a User Needs statement and shared this with all stakeholders. We also shortlisted 3 potential solutions from 3 different solution partners with agreed timeline and complete financials.