Kettle Cuisine
Case Study: Kettle Cuisine
About The Company
Founded in 1986, Kettle Cuisine delivers over 90 varieties of fresh, refrigerated, high quality soups, chilies, and chowders to hundreds of restaurants and retailers in the eastern United States. Kettle Cuisine’s soups are made the way soups should be made: with made-from-scratch stocks, fresh vegetables, natural ingredients, and traditional herbs and spices. Furthermore, Kettle Cuisine never adds artificial ingredients, chemically produced additives or flavor enhancers, or prepared bases to their soups. The result is clean, delicious, homemade flavor.
The Situation
Because of the need to optimize shelf life into distribution channels, Kettle Cuisine requires very accurate operation and production schedules. All raw materials and finished soups are extremely expiration-date sensitive. Kettle Cuisine’s previous method of forecasting was to create a spreadsheet two days before production, with sales orders taken up until one day before, and finally revising the spreadsheet the day of production. As its reputation for quality grew, so did the company’s sales. As Kettle Cuisine’s sales grew, so did the frustration, time spent, and errors from using the spreadsheet method of production forecasting. What’s more, many of Kettle Cuisine’s soups have unique characteristics that control how and when the soup is prepared each day, another significant challenge when using spreadsheets for production scheduling.
Benefits & Results
With the most robust production scheduling features, the ProcessPro® ERP software system controls all of Kettle Cuisine’s manufacturing components. With accurate projection capabilities, Kettle Cuisine now has onhand the fresh produce, meats, and other highly perishable raw materials needed for its soups without the worry of exceeding the expiration date. ProcessPro® software has made it possible for Kettle Cuisine to cook over one hundred batches of soup per day in kettles with capacities ranging from 150 to 325 . Timing and speed are essential to Kettle Cuisine’s success and, with ProcessPro® software, they are now able to manage the large volume of orders that are opened and closed each day. Even with soup production occurring 20 hours per day, Kettle Cuisine’s
manufacturing process is simple and easy to follow with immediate online access to information. Real-time reports are available to the sales department about what can be produced at any given time for accurate customer order fulfillment. Overall, ProcessPro® software has played a significant role in Kettle Cuisine’s success in increasing capacity, integrating production and planning processes, minimizing personnel changes, and much more!
Material Requirements Planning (MRP)
Kettle Cuisine’s main concern was being able to plan and buy materials with a 24- hour planning horizon. The majority of their finished goods have a shelf life of less than 35 days and their raw materials have considerably less. With ProcessPro® software’s sales order forecasting and MRP functionality, Kettle Cuisine can create hundreds of orders and determine the raw materials necessary for production in a matter of minutes.
Production Scheduling
During different seasons of the year, Kettle Cuisine produces between 30,000 and 40,000 cases of fresh soup per week. With over 20 hours of manufacturing time daily, they require the ability to know the realtime status of each soup order throughout the day. By utilizing ProcessPro® software Visual Scheduler, Kettle Cuisine now has the ability to view scheduling, order details, and realtime progress of any product. A click and drag capability makes schedule manipulation easy Physical Inventory. Kettle Cuisine typically performs physical inventory monthly. They needed a software system that would allow production and sales transactions to continue simultaneously during the data entry process. The Physical Inventory application of ProcessPro ® software allows all processing to occur during the physical inventory process.
Customer Profitability
This soup company strives to be as flexible with its customers as it possibly can when it comes to packaging and proprietary ingredients. Because of this, Kettle Cuisine requires the ability to track profitability for each of its customers. ProcessPro® software was able to tailor its transaction level processing software to track customer and project related information. Kettle Cuisine is able to produce customer financial profitabilty reporting at any time.
Prioritize Work Orders
Kettle Cuisine needed to prioritize its USDA regulated schedule for soup manufacturing. Additionally, they needed to carefully schedule soup varieties to avoid allergen issues. ProcessPro® software recommends scheduling orders by priority level. Once scheduled, a report of similar raw materials is used to pick and prepare ingredients as close as possible to actual soup cook time.
Automated Warehouse Management
Kettle Cuisine looked for ways to increase operational efficiency, reduce costly and time-consuming data entry, and improve the planning and reporting processes. A comprehensive automated warehouse solution would provide several key benefits. ProcessPro® software’s
Automated Warehouse
Management-Bar Code System helped Kettle Cuisine eliminate redundant duel entry of data, reduce errors with real-time validation, and increase employee satisfaction, just to name a few!
