ERP Case Study

Don’s Salads

Location Schwenksville, Pennsylvania

Solution ProcessPro

Industry Food and Beverage

ProcessPro

Learn More Compare All Aptean Software

Don’s Salads Case Study for ProcessPro ERP

The Company: About Don’s Salads

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!

The Situation: Reliable Customer Support

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.

The Solution: ProcessPro ERP

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 addition, the solution provided much needed integration with outside accountants to reconcile data every month.

Software Add-on Applications:

• Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)

• Warehouse Management Solution (WMS)

• Dock Scheduling

• Business Intelligence (BI) Suite Reporting

The Results: ProcessPro Implementation Benefits

Quality Control

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.

Pricing/Margin Analysis

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.

Sales Reporting with Business Intelligence

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.

“As our company grows and ProcessPro grows, we will be implementing different features and take advantage of those,” states Lyter. They recently began utilizing Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) for expansion into the retail environment to improve order accuracy and save time compared to the previous manual input of information. Don’s has had success with inventory accuracy, especially in regards to reconciling discrepancies in mispicks/customer shortages and will continue to streamline their processes within the solution functionality.

Additional ProcessPro Case Studies

Below, you can explore additional ERP case studies, showcasing companies that have reaped significant benefits from successful ERP implementations of ProcessPro.

Additional Food and Beverage Industry Case Studies

Explore additional case studies below, featuring companies in the Food and Beverage Industry. Also, see our comprehensive side-by-side comparison of all ERP systems for the Food and Beverage industry.

Still seeking industry-specific information? Compare the top ERP software for the Food and Beverage Industry to find the product that best meets your company's needs and budget.