Download PDF
Love and Quiches Gourmet Inc. responds to recalls with pinpoint accuracy
Technology Category
- Analytics & Modeling - Data-as-a-Service
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
- Functional Applications - Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP)
Applicable Industries
- Food & Beverage
Applicable Functions
- Logistics & Transportation
- Quality Assurance
Use Cases
- Inventory Management
- Supply Chain Visibility
- Track & Trace of Assets
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
Love and Quiches Gourmet strictly controls its food products, generating thousands of lot numbers during manufacturing. Every item in each step of production carries full lot identification, from raw materials such as eggs, to batches of cake batter, to storage and shipment of finished products. However, the organization used various software applications to manage its highly involved manufacturing process and manual, error-prone spreadsheets to track lot numbers. The business lacked one integrated system that could process orders and track raw materials. When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a recall, manual tracking made it difficult to trace an ingredient’s origin and then identify the affected batches and finished products. As a result, Love and Quiches Gourmet chose the most costly solution: discarding any products that could possibly contain a recalled ingredient. The lack of an integrated system also hindered the auditing process and made it difficult to capture production costs. Love and Quiches Gourmet always passed its FDA audits; however, because records resided in multiple applications, the auditing process was excessively time-consuming. The same issue applied to production costing, making it difficult to aggregate the data to a granular level.
About The Customer
Founded in 1973 and headquartered in Freeport, New York, Love and Quiches Gourmet Inc. is a leading gourmet food manufacturer. Annually, the company produces approximately 18 million pounds of product and 400 SKUs, including single-serve desserts and quiches. Customers include domestic and international food service operators, retailers and distributors. The company strictly controls its food products, generating thousands of lot numbers during manufacturing. Every item in each step of production carries full lot identification, from raw materials such as eggs, to batches of cake batter, to storage and shipment of finished products. However, the organization used various software applications to manage its highly involved manufacturing process and manual, error-prone spreadsheets to track lot numbers. The business lacked one integrated system that could process orders and track raw materials.
The Solution
Love and Quiches Gourmet engaged IBM Business Partner Vormittag Associates, Inc. (VAI) to implement its VAI S2K Enterprise for Food ERP application. The system was the dessert manufacturer’s top choice because VAI performed an extensive customized analysis process that included a business requirements study, a 5-year cost of ownership comparison and a true cost of implementation quote. The system relies on IBM® DB2® Express Edition software for data warehousing and is hosted on IBM Power® 720 Express server technology running on the IBM iSeries® platform. IBM Cognos® Express software provides sales reporting, and IBM Global Financing offered the necessary funding. The VAI S2K Enterprise for Food application integrates seamlessly with Love and Quiches Gourmet’s technical modules, including inventory management, product quality and material requirement planning. The solution also incorporates sales data with cost data, providing insight into production costs. The ERP system captures and tracks lot data in a family-tree format: lot numbers for raw materials connect to corresponding batch materials, which connect to the resulting end products and shipping details. The system creates a comprehensive transaction file that Love and Quiches Gourmet can use to trace raw materials and create detailed reports for auditors. The solution also delivers an executive dashboard on which managers can view summaries for accounts receivable, accounts payable, inventory valuation, sales order and financial status.
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.
