Download PDF
Gehl’s Implements Aptean Ross ERP for Improved Operational Efficiency
Technology Category
- Functional Applications - Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP)
Applicable Industries
- Food & Beverage
Applicable Functions
- Logistics & Transportation
Use Cases
- Inventory Management
- Supply Chain Visibility
Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
Gehl’s Guernsey Farms, a leader in specialized aseptic food products, faced challenges in communication and integration between different departments within its 230-person headquarters. The company's growth led to stretched resources and the need for additional support to keep up with customer needs. Information within one department was often not visible to the rest of the organization, leading to inefficiencies. The inventory tracking system experienced frequent shutdowns, requiring significant time from the IT manager to keep it running. Gehl’s lacked an enterprise system with sophisticated reporting technology to support its growing business lines and overall expansion. The company also needed a system to comply with emerging technology standards. Without a company-wide inventory management solution, Gehl’s was forced to conduct manual physical inventory, which became increasingly time-consuming as the company added new product lines.
About The Customer
Gehl’s Guernsey Farms was established in 1894 as a milk and cream delivery service. The company is now the nation’s leader in specialized aseptic food products, supplying more than 100,000 stores, restaurants and concessionaires with high-quality, ready-to-serve food items. Gehl’s is a pioneer in making private-label puddings, nutritional drinks and cheese sauces for some of the best-known grocery brands, while still offering high-quality dairy products to bakers, restaurants and catering services under the respected Gehl’s name. With corporate headquarters located in Germantown, Wis., Gehl’s products are behind some of America’s best-known brands and private labels.
The Solution
To improve operational effectiveness, Gehl’s evaluated enterprise resource planning vendors and selected Ross Enterprise’s ERP solution, implementing the system in the fall of 1999. The Ross ERP solution enhanced operational efficiency by streamlining operations and delivering superior customer service. The solution also provided real-time reporting capabilities, increasing Gehl’s visibility enterprise-wide and generating more than 60 reports the company reviews on a daily basis. With Ross ERP, executive management no longer has to wait until the end of the month to view overall company numbers. The logistics department also gained increased visibility into scheduling and distribution, improving coordination for shipping schedules. The solution also increased inventory control, eliminating issues around shipping expired products and saving the company money in shipping costs.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
The Kellogg Company
Kellogg keeps a close eye on its trade spend, analyzing large volumes of data and running complex simulations to predict which promotional activities will be the most effective. Kellogg needed to decrease the trade spend but its traditional relational database on premises could not keep up with the pace of demand.
Case Study
HEINEKEN Uses the Cloud to Reach 10.5 Million Consumers
For 2012 campaign, the Bond promotion, it planned to launch the campaign at the same time everywhere on the planet. That created unprecedented challenges for HEINEKEN—nowhere more so than in its technology operation. The primary digital content for the campaign was a 100-megabyte movie that had to play flawlessly for millions of viewers worldwide. After all, Bond never fails. No one was going to tolerate a technology failure that might bruise his brand.Previously, HEINEKEN had supported digital media at its outsourced datacenter. But that datacenter lacked the computing resources HEINEKEN needed, and building them—especially to support peak traffic that would total millions of simultaneous hits—would have been both time-consuming and expensive. Nor would it have provided the geographic reach that HEINEKEN needed to minimize latency worldwide.
Case Study
Energy Management System at Sugar Industry
The company wanted to use the information from the system to claim under the renewable energy certificate scheme. The benefit to the company under the renewable energy certificates is Rs 75 million a year. To enable the above, an end-to-end solution for load monitoring, consumption monitoring, online data monitoring, automatic meter data acquisition which can be exported to SAP and other applications is required.
Case Study
Coca Cola Swaziland Conco Case Study
Coco Cola Swaziland, South Africa would like to find a solution that would enable the following results: - Reduce energy consumption by 20% in one year. - Formulate a series of strategic initiatives that would enlist the commitment of corporate management and create employee awareness while helping meet departmental targets and investing in tools that assist with energy management. - Formulate a series of tactical initiatives that would optimize energy usage on the shop floor. These would include charging forklifts and running cold rooms only during off-peak periods, running the dust extractors only during working hours and basing lights and air-conditioning on someone’s presence. - Increase visibility into the factory and other processes. - Enable limited, non-intrusive control functions for certain processes.
Case Study
Temperature Monitoring for Restaurant Food Storage
When it came to implementing a solution, Mr. Nesbitt had an idea of what functionality that he wanted. Although not mandated by Health Canada, Mr. Nesbitt wanted to ensure quality control issues met the highest possible standards as part of his commitment to top-of-class food services. This wish list included an easy-to use temperature-monitoring system that could provide a visible display of the temperatures of all of his refrigerators and freezers, including historical information so that he could review the performance of his equipment. It also had to provide alert notification (but email alerts and SMS text message alerts) to alert key staff in the event that a cooling system was exceeding pre-set warning limits.
Case Study
Coca-Cola Refreshments, U.S.
Coca-Cola Refreshments owns and manages Coca-Cola branded refrigerators in retail establishments. Legacy systems were used to locate equipment information by logging onto multiple servers which took up to 8 hours to update information on 30-40 units. The company had no overall visibility into equipment status or maintenance history.
