ThE OriginAl CAkEriE

CASE STUDY
The Original Cakerie
CUSTOMER
PROFILE
Starting in 1979 as a small industrial bakery producing desserts for restaurants
in British Columbia, The Original Cakerie (TOC) opened its Vancouver head
office and plant in 1989, and a second baking facility and warehouse in London,
Ontario in 2011. Today they are the largest privately owned dessert manufacturer
in Canada, employing some 500 people, with their frozen single-layer and supersize layer cakes, sheet cakes and sheet dessert bars sold to in the foodservice and
retail markets in Canada and the U.S.
2
THE
CHALLENGE
Back in 2006, TOC’s biggest challenge was the lack
of a single, integrated system, which created data
silos and a lack of data visibility,” says Eric Murphy,
Director, Information Technology. The company
had been using many internally built applications,
backed by Great Plains on the financials side. These
home grown systems were not able to sustain the
JustFoodERP,” Murphy recalls, and his team chose
the “user-friendly and adaptable” JustFoodERP
system built on the powerful ERP platform,
Microsoft Dynamics.
The Original Cakerie has long seen a direct link
between technology and the ability to anticipate
challenge of business growth, so TOC looked into
and adapt to growth. “You could say I’m a model
system. “Our internal team, which represented
of the system to work for us,” says Murphy of his
that were a possible fit to work with: IFS and
their software technology partner.
investing in an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
IT person in that I invest in a system and I want all
each business unit, came down to two solutions
seven-year journey to date with JustFoodERP as
THE
SOLUTION
Phase 1 Implementation
With 80 users going live simultaneously at the
Vancouver location in 2006, the JustFoodERP
implementation included Financials, Payroll,
Human Resources, Fixed Assets, and TargIT as well
as Manufacturing, Quality Control, Preventive
Maintenance, and Labor Scheduling functionality.
The latter piece was built so TOC employees can
pick the days and hours they want to work and have
it recorded in the ERP system. “Labor Scheduling
was, and remains, a huge win for us,” says Murphy,
“meeting our employee preferences, shift time,
position, visibility for all - based on production
orders and labor demand, coming from the routing
- connecting all this, with systematic assignment of
shifts based on all this slew of criteria.”
“The elimination of duplicate
information is key to managing
the shop floor”
- Eric Murphy, Director, Information
Technology, The Original Cakerie
3
(cont’d)
THE
SOLUTION
Phase 2 Implementation
Today, the 80 users are spread between the two
locations - about 60 of them at the Vancouver
facility. Functionality within JustFoodERP has
extended since Phase 1 to include several other
aspects of the software system, including a big
focus on improving Quality Management processes,
as well as earning food safety certification, trade
promotion management, and some laboratory
functionality such as product development. The
JustFoodERP warehouse management system is in
the works.
Driven by customer demand, TOC spent 2012
involved in the process of certifying to the BRC Food
Standard, which falls under the Global Food Safety
Initiative (GFSI) standard for food safety and quality.
BRC certification requires procedural changes to
their business, which can be accommodated by
JustFoodERP. “We’re very proud of being BRC certified
at both our facilities,” says Murphy. “BRC fit into our
goal to delivering safe quality food… we have good
traceability all the way through to corrective action.”
The highest level (‘A’) of BRC certification was
first completed mid-2012 at TOC’s 400-employee
Vancouver, British Columbia plant and head office
followed by certification at the London, Ontario
facility by the end of 2012. Both facilities have
received Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA),
and Food and Drug Agency (FDA) approvals following
evaluation of their Good Manufacturing Practices
(GMP) and HACCP programs.
At each location, a cross-functional team across all
business units, led by the company’s QA Director,
worked on the BRC certification process. TOC
employees worked on the integration of shop floor
reporting to capture variations and deviations
that are captured on the Variation Form. An event
is created that is tracked within the company’s
JustFoodERP system “so we know exactly when
these variations have occurred, by whom and for
which product,” says Murphy. The event is assigned
to a supervisor and reviewed. If it requires further
investigation, they have integrated BRC’s Corrective
Action Form within JustFoodERP.
“We’re very proud of being BRC certified at both our facilities, which fits into our
goal to deliver safe quality food... we have good traceability all the way through
to corrective action”
4
- Eric Murphy, Director, Information Technology
The Original Cakerie
(cont’d)
THE
SOLUTION
In the Quality Management piece of their ERP system,
TOC has integrated Lot Holds functionality so their QA
team can assign specific dispositions on the lot or action
item, and from that point on, the operations team does
what needs to be done; when the lot is released, it can
ship. “We’re working on what we call ‘positive release;’
based on product subject to testing, the system will
automatically put the lock on a pre-determined time
on hold. After a certain window of time, the product
is released and ready to ship,” Murphy says. “We want
better control between the time we manufacture and
the time we do the testing, so we don’t send any product
that might have to be recalled.”
adding more confidential information such as
volume-based reports (trade spend requests,
rebate requests, etc.) into the broker portal,” says
Murphy.
TOC is also in the midst of fully integrating all their recipe
information, including instructions within the production
Bill of Materials (BOM) and product specifications, into
one central repository. “The elimination of duplicate
information is key to managing the shop floor,” Murphy
notes. “Capturing data costs money; if data is entered
once, you should be able to use it across your system.”
TOC is looking into implementing the Warehouse
Management (WMS) piece of their JustFoodERP
system, including its mobility-enabled JF Floor
functionality, with the goal to “bring speed of
execution and barcode scanning” at the two TOC
warehouses (one in each of their locations), for
a “more efficient flow of information between
inventory, staging and product use,” says Murphy.
“From a traceability perspective, barcodes are a
huge enabler.”
With a new product development person driving that
piece of the JustFoodERP system, the company is working
with laboratory functionalities. “We want to separate
(product) BOM and product development, so we will have
a less restrictive environment for product development,”
says Murphy.
The company has used Electronic Data Interchange
(EDI) technology within JustFoodERP since their
2006 implementation, but nowadays “we’re using
lot more EDI than ever before, and we’re now
looking into support for Advance Shipping Notice
[ASN],” says Murphy. “The biggest retailers are
driving this requirement.”
Phase 3 Implementation
On the sales side, trade promotions are managed within
JustFoodERP for foodservice customers, with plans to roll
the TPM technology out for retail, too. “We have created
a broker portal to help share product profile information
with our broker community, and now are looking at
5
THE
BENEFITS
The fact of having gone from all data silo
applications across different departments to one
main ERP system, where “90% of our business
processes are centralized… is a success on its own,”
states Murphy. “Real time visibility of our shop
floor has been a big win from what we had before
JustFoodERP was implemented.” “Now we have more
insight on the true cost of manufacturing, of course
we want even more.” Everything that TOC is doing
with technology is “providing for our customers’
growth,” says Murphy, but “also it helps us look at
how we do things and drives improvement within
our organization.”
The Original Cakerie is looking
into implementing the Warehouse
Management System within
JustFoodERP, including its mobilityenabled JF Floor functionality,
with the goal of bringing speed of
execution and barcode scanning
at their two warehouses
6
THE
FUTURE
“We just built a three-year roadmap for IT plans at
we build a bridge to seamlessly integrate that into
in it for continuing expansion of their JustFoodERP
to really look at the gaps where business process
the company,” says Murphy, and there is lots of room
system. “My philosophy is that the system should
enable our people to do their work more effectively
by automating the non-valued added tasks,
increasing productivity and capacity.”
Pushing intelligent forms directly to the system,
once workflow approvals are done, is the endgame; TOC is documenting all their business
procedures and process workflows. “We have
full-blown documentation in SharePoint, and once
SOLUTION SUMMARY
JustFoodERP and Microsoft Dynamics
Locations: Vancouver, BC and London, ON – production
facilities and warehouses at both locations
Implemented Modules:
Financials, Reporting, Human Resources, Labor Scheduling,
Fixed Assets, Preventive Maintenance, Manufacturing,
Quality Management, Food Safety, Product Development,
Trade Promotion Management, EDI, Inventory Management,
Web Portal, Mobile WMS.
our JustFoodERP system, it will give us the ability
management can happen.”
Murphy adds that “another opportunity for us
this fiscal year will be more advanced Business
Intelligence, more around our core operations which
is manufacturing.” As well, capacity-based planning
and growth is very much on the minds of TOC
management; the company serves West Coast and
East Coast of both Canada and the U.S. out of their
respectively located plants and warehouses.
“We have created a portal to help
share product profile information
with our broker community, and
now are looking at adding more
confidential information such as
volume-based reports”
- Eric Murphy, Director,
Information Technology
The Original Cakerie
7
“
We have better control between the time we
manufacture and the time we do the testing.
Shipping products occurs once all testing has
”
been received and validated.
- Eric Murphy, Director, Information Technology
The Original Cakerie