Case Study – Don’s Salads

• Functional Applications - Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP)

• Food & Beverage

• Discrete Manufacturing
• Quality Assurance

• System Integration

Don’s Salads’ previous disparate systems, MAS 90, Parity and ProcessLogic, were a hindrance to their day-to-day operations. The legacy system was heavily customized and the customer support received was minimal at best. Daily operations were visibly slow and lacked integration between departments. Don’s Salads’ staff often spent 45 minutes placing a single customer sales order which involved creating a mock sales order in a separate system to complete the order for manufacturing, and then reworking the mock order to ensure accurate accounting. Don’s desired a unified solution that integrated their accounting and manufacturing functions as their future growth depended on it. “The critical needs that we had were lot traceability, accounting and being able to schedule our production in a streamlined fashion,” said Michele Lyter, Office and HR Manager, Don’s Salads. In their search for an ERP provider, they wanted a true business partner with reliable customer support and a solution that would take their entire manufacturing processes to the next level.

Founded in 1970, Don’s Salads is a gourmet manufacturer of ready-to serve salads, gourmet cream cheese spreads, dips, entrees and desserts that are prepared fresh daily, using only the finest ingredients available. They ship 90 percent of their products within 24 hours of completion to preserve freshness for the consumer. Their team is continually introducing new products worthy of their name and improving the outstanding quality of their existing finished goods. Priding themselves on a combination of quality, value and service has made Don’s Salads one of the top selling salad and prepared food manufacturers on the east coast. Once you’ve tried them, we’re sure you’ll agree - Tasting...Makes the Difference!

After evaluating other ERP solutions, Don’s Salads implemented ProcessPro in August 2014, a fully integrated, real-time ERP solution customized to meet their manufacturing needs. ProcessPro enabled Don’s to eliminate daily data re-entry in multiple systems and streamlined their production scheduling with the integrated reporting functionality of the Business Intelligence (BI) Suite. The flexibility of the system and ability to automate daily and weekly reports provided Don’s with visibility across their entire organization, a feature that was lacking with their previous solutions. In additon, the solution provided much needed integration with outside accountants to reconcile data every month.

• Don’s Salads places high regard on the quality and consistency of their end products to maintain customer satisfaction and ensure returning customers. The use of ProcessPro’s quality control functionality enables Don’s to control the quality of its products beginning with incoming raw materials, through finished goods manufacturing, all the way to final packaging. They have the flexibility to place raw materials in quarantine hold status if they do not pass quality control standards and ensure they are not released for production until levels are corrected. With the help of ProcessPro, they have been able to consistently produce high quality, fresh products and comply with Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations, daily USDA inspections and customer specific standards.
• Within the functionality of the software, Don’s has been able to easily analyze and compute profit margins on each individual product line and recipe by accounting for varying costs of raw ingredients. This allows them to establish growth strategies within product lines and expand into new markets with their launch of Melanie’s Medleys, a line of non-GMO artisan grain breakfast bowls and handcrafted cream cheeses, and The Artisan Deli, a line of handmade, small batch deli salads with clean and simple ingredients.
• ProcessPro’s interactive BI Suite provides Don’s with the ability to maintain, analyze and share critical manufacturing and sales information across their organization using data maintained in the ERP and other sources. Easy-to-use report building provides their sales team the needed visibility and insight into their sales and customer data, empowering the sales team to make smarter business decisions.

• Reduced time spent on placing a single customer sales order from 45 minutes to a significantly lower time (exact time not mentioned).
• Improved inventory accuracy, especially in regards to reconciling discrepancies in mispicks/customer shortages.