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Food ERP System Helps Cheese Company Meet Government and Customer Compliance Issues

By Thomas R. Cutler, Manufacturing Journalist -- 2/22/2006 1:46:00 PM

The Green Bay Cheese Co. faced significant challenges due to government regulations and customer compliance issues.

They needed an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software package that could:
• Track individual cheese lots from raw material receipt through consumption in manufacturing and onto shipment of finished product to their retail and food service customers
• Manage special customer pricing requirements based upon the current market price for cheese
• Provide detailed costing of their manufacturing operations
• Prepare customer-specific private labeling of product including product details and lot analysis information.

The Green Bay Cheese Co. found their solution in TGI’s food ERP package, Enterprise 21. According to Rebecca Gill, TGI's vice-president, “Green Bay Cheese was able to address their requirements and more.”

Specifically the cheese manufacturer is now able to:
• Electronically store womb-to-tomb lot tracking of cheese so that a given lot of cheese can be traced to all customers who received material produced from that particular lot
• Interactively calculate online customer pricing based upon cheese market price and customer pricing factors
• Automatically generate customer-specific labels which include not only customer logos and barcodes, but also the retail customer’s price to the consumer.

Food Manufacturers and the Bioterrorism Act
Green Bay Cheese is not alone in their requirement to meet the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act of 2002. The Bioterrorism Act directs the Secretary of Health and Human Services to issue final regulations that establish requirements regarding the establishment and maintenance, for not longer than two years, of records by persons (excluding farms, restaurants and certain others) who manufacture, process, pack, transport, distribute, receive, hold, or import food. The records that must be kept are those that are needed by the Secretary for inspection to allow the Secretary to identify the immediate previous sources and immediate subsequent recipients of food, including its packaging, in order to address credible threats of serious adverse health consequences or death to humans or animals. This regulation implements the recordkeeping authority in the Bioterrorism Act.

The Bioterrorism Act makes failure to establish and maintain the required records, or failure to make them available to FDA, a prohibited act with serious consequences. All food manufacturers must meet compliance by the end of 2006. The bottom-line is that lot traceability documentation for food manufacturers is not an option, it is required by law.

ERP Features For Food Manufacturers and Distributors
From Inventory Control to Purchasing, an ERP system for the food sector must perform certain key functions. Order Management, Manufacturing, General Ledger, Accounts Payable, and Accounts Receivable efficiencies must also be taken into consideration.

ERP Inventory Control for Food Manufacturers must include:
• Integrated Warehouse Management system
• Multi-location and bins per warehouse
• Prime pick, put-away, and restocking locations by product code
• Sophisticated product configurator
• Bill of material maintenance for kitting
• Fully attributed inventory
• Lot Control with analysis
• RF and bar code enabled

ERP Purchasing Functionality for Food Manufacturers must include:
• Multiple suppliers and purchasing rules per stocking part number
• Vendor RFQ processing
• Automatic creation of purchase orders based upon replenishment rules
• Automatic or manual generation of requisitions
• Blanket purchase orders
• Electronic signature approval
• Vendor performance tracking

Due to the government regulations and compliance issues, Inventory Control may be the most important function to consider, yet a fully functioning integrated system is critical to cost justify the Food ERP acquisition and achieve a rapid return-on-investment. With the ERP implementation, Green Bay Cheese Company is better equipped to serve customers, ranging from grocery stores and food service distributors to government agencies, while maintaining their reputation of exceptional customer service and competitive product offering.

TGI
www.tgiltd.com