Business Needs
Wine Country Kitchens, in California’s Napa Valley, produces natural gourmet foods such as pasta sauces, tapenades, oils and vinegars, and is best known for its barbeque sauce. It produces more than 500 custom items and handles custom contract packaging for a number of independent developers. The company’s operations largely depended on dated manual systems that became recipes for big problems. The company was managing finished goods and materials in separate databases, with sales and finance tracked in QuickBooks and all of its manufacturing requirements in Excel. Its complex sales-order and manufacturing processes strained this manual system. Order entry was especially taxing, with as many as three different documents required for each order. The company was suffering a drain in personnel, time and money from manual errors in order entry, production and inventory. The plodding processes resulted in shipping turnaround requirements of as much as 72 to 96 hours. Furthermore, since raw-material purchases and usage were documented manually, forecasting was difficult, as was the ability to evaluate materials consumption. Lot tracking of materials consumed significant resources, and month-end inventory reconciliation took days to complete. Write-offs were proliferating. While confronting all of these barriers, Wine Country Kitchens was also trying to expand rapidly. Over the previous four years, the company had nearly tripled its growth, beginning with a simple product line and expanding its offering to hundreds of custom stock keeping units. Attempting to manage this growth manually took a heavy toll on employee productivity and accuracy. The company realized that it needed highly integrated and automated technology to meet its needs.
Solution
Wine Country Kitchens partnered with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner SCS, Inc., of San Mateo, Calif., to evaluate potential solutions. After interviewing a number of other food manufacturers who were using Microsoft Dynamics NAV, Wine Country Kitchens was quickly convinced that this technology was the right match for the complexity of its own operations. Of particular value to the company were the capabilities for blanket orders, kit processing, lot tracking and pricing rules that were built into the Microsoft Dynamics NAV solution. This would allow the company to create flexible kit bills of material that its sales staff could change to meet the needs of individual customers at the time the order was placed. Items could be tracked easily by lot numbers, so that staff could determine when and where each piece of merchandise was received, where it was stored, and when and where it was sold. With a single, integrated database, Microsoft Dynamics NAV required customer and order information to be entered only once, and all the processes—order, manufacturing and distribution—would draw on that same accurate, real-time database. The system would allow the company to automate its sales process and potentially improve its materials planning tremendously. Wine Country Kitchens reported that, right out of the box, Microsoft Dynamics NAV was able to satisfy 95 percent of its business needs with little customization.
Benefits
Wine Country Kitchens transitioned from a reactive sales company to a proactive one. The company now manages the flow of materials, production and inventory to gain a much improved order turnaround time and shorter production lead times. The sales staff is able to concentrate on achieving new sales goals instead of spending the majority of their time on paperwork from previous sales, and warehouse employees focus on shipping instead of searching for inventory.
The availability of accurate, real-time inventory information at the point of order entry has improved the company’s customer service 100 percent.
• Even with the incorporation of lot tracking into its processes, Wine Country Kitchens has cut order entry and turnaround time by 30 percent.
• Shipping turnaround time has decreased to just 24 to 48 hours from the previous 72 to 96 hours.
• Considerable time savings in workflow is being generated, with less paperwork and manual follow-up.
• Errors in data resulting from duplicate entries have been eliminated.
• The company also expects to benefit from improved materials and production cost management, now that manual raw-material depletions have been eliminated.
• With Microsoft Dynamics NAV, the company anticipates reducing the time needed for inventory reconciliation by at least 50 percent.
• Wine Country Kitchens will be able to calculate the true cost of materials and labor in real time. Previously, valuation of finished goods was based on theoretical figures in a fluctuating market of fresh and imported ingredients.
• Sales and accounting processes have become far more efficient.
• Kit ordering enables sales staff to confirm orders at input, instead of waiting hours for the manual validation of the inventory.
• Nearly all documents relating to special price and cost considerations have been eradicated, with the information incorporated instead within the Microsoft Dynamics NAV system.
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Wine Country Kitchen Case Study
Solution Overview
Organization Profile
Located in Napa Calif., Wine Country Kitchens produces all natural gourmet foods including barbeque and pastas sauces, tapenades, oils and vinegars, along with providing custom packing for food developers.
Partner(s)
SCS
Software and Services
Microsoft Dynamics NAV
Vertical Industries
Grocery and Specialty Food
Durable Goods Merchant Wholesalers
Nondurable Goods Wholesaling
Country/Region
United States |
