Aptean Food & Beverage ERP Gives Moulton Bulb Co. Greater Visibility and Profitability
Accurate data capture and reporting puts produce business in a position for growth
Industry
Food & Beverage
Challenges
» Reliant on cumbersome paper-based record keeping
» Need for greater traceability throughout supply chain
Benefits
» Greater accessibility of KPI and management reports
» Confidence in accurate, realtime data and metrics
Established in 1979, Moulton Bulb Company Ltd. is one of the largest suppliers of onions, garlic and shallots to the UK market. The company supplies more than 1,700 tons of onions each week to customers including Asda, Waitrose, Sainsbury’s, Co-operative Food and Iceland Foods, amounting to more than 25% of the UK’s supermarket requirement.
Headquartered in Moulton, the company employs 300 staff responsible for grading, packing, labeling and distributing whole and prepared alliums supplied both from its own farm and a specially selected group of growers from the length and breadth of the UK.
Technology is at the forefront of Moulton Bulb’s operations, and the company is focused on process innovation to improve quality and drive cost out of the business. In fact, the factory features the only fully automatic robotic onion peelers in the world.
Enabling Growth
In order to drive the business forward, the management team identified a need for greater visibility and easier access of management information and improved structure to the production process.
In the past, the company had been reliant on many paper-based processes, which limited user access and created huge files. The company was using outdated software for sales order processing and required a userfriendly replacement which would be favorably accepted by employees.
Specifically, Moulton Bulb wanted to streamline its entire process to quicken traceability, produce more in-depth reports, modernize its produce booking systems and increase mobile visibility of factory performance.
Covering All the Bases with One Solution
Among the first things that the Moulton Bulb team noticed about Aptean Food & Beverage ERP LINKFRESH Edition was the ease with which the platform captures data on inbound produce efficiently in great detail.
The solution also provides state-of-the-art mobility applications for stock management, quality control, intake, picking, dispatch and label printing, as well as a touchscreen user interface. After attending a seminar by Aptean, Moulton Bulb Company opted for whole-site implementation of Aptean Food & Beverage ERP software.
The results have been impressive. Information about inbound produce is now captured more efficiently and in greater detail. Crop information, such as growers’ accreditations, technical details, use of chemicals, field information, crop size and variety ensures the product is exactly as ordered.
Purchase orders for the vendors are automatically created, and Aptean-generated labels include a batch barcode which ensures full live product traceability through the grading, packing, storage and dispatch process. Bar codes are scanned every time stock moves, giving operatives instant information on the product history, identity, size, lot number, finished quantity and order details.
Moulton Bulb found Aptean Food & Beverage ERP mirrored the existing process, in terms of information produced, but did so in an easier to use manner with the familiarity and renowned easy navigation of Microsoft. Reporting was also simpler and quicker to access.
In order to give the Moulton Bulb Company management total confidence, Aptean’s solution was run in a live parallel simulated process to ensure the new system performed as required. This eradicated any risk when the new system replaced the old.
“There are measurable efficiency benefits. Traceability of product, for example, can now be done in a quarter of the time,” said Robert Oldershaw Jr., Director of Moulton Bulb. “The information we now have at our fingertips and systems we have in place will help us to grow the business.”
Working in Sync with Reporting Tools
The Aptean system was fully compatible with their existing analytics software and was able to provide a greater level of data more accurately and efficiently for management reports.
Sales order reports are now accessible online, meaning business decisions are better informed and can be taken remotely. Sales orders can be tracked by days, weeks or years and split by department and product.
With 26 NAV and 35 mobile/touchscreens across the factory, shift and line performance can be analyzed immediately and remotely. The data includes shift performance, production orders, outputs, consumption and downtime.
There are currently 60 Aptean Food & Beverage ERP users across the factory, meaning all data is input in real time.
“I have been impressed by user acceptance of Aptean, with the vast majority of employees finding it simple to use and helpful in their everyday tasks,” said Oldershaw.
Equipped for the Future
Oldershaw explains the benefits Aptean has brought to the company:
“Aptean Food & Beverage ERP has brought everything together in our business. Our key driver was to get information out of the operations side of the business and to aid the physical process. Ultimately, we needed better visibility across our entire operation.”
“We are more efficient in terms of production times and costs. With Aptean, we can immediately stop work preproduction if any issues arise—such as using a wrong batch of produce—rather than after production has begun. In this sense, Aptean Food & Beverage ERP has enabled us to be more proactive than reactive.”
Oldershaw concluded by commenting on how the application of Aptean software will help the company expand in the coming years.
“The Aptean team invested the time to really get to know our business, and the phased implementation of their ERP solution allowed us to tailor our requirements as we went along. I now feel we are more professional and robust in our approach and our interaction with suppliers and customers, and we’ve actually got to know our own business a lot better. The information we now have at our fingertips and systems we have in place will help us to grow the business.”
About Aptean
Aptean is one of the world’s leading providers of industry-specific software. Our enterprise resource planning and supply chain solutions are uniquely designed to meet the needs of specialized manufacturers and distributors, while our compliance solutions serve specific markets such as finance and life sciences. With both cloud and on-premise deployment options, Aptean’s products, services and unmatched expertise help businesses of all sizes, across many industries, to scale and succeed.
For more information, visit www.aptean.com.
