Rapak

The Company: About Rapak

Rapak, TriMas company, manufactures flexible packaging bag-in-box solutions used for food and beverages such as dairy products, wine, soft drinks and premixed smoothies, and for household and industrial use cases like agricultural, pharmaceutical, chemical, industrial and personal care products. The benefits of bag-in-box packaging include its ultra-hygienic nature and low cost. Bag-in-box packaging solutions extend product shelf life, are easier to store and transport, and offer user-friendly single-handed dispensing.

They are also a more sustainable form of packaging with half the carbon footprint of glass wine bottles. 

TriMas, a global manufacturer and provider of products in the consumer products, aerospace and industrial markets, including packaging, acquired Rapak in early 2020 after the company was spun off from Liqui-Box. Rapak is headquartered in Woodbridge, Illinois. It operates multiple manufacturing plants and sells and distributes its products around the world.

The Situation: Implementation Deadline

Following the acquisition by TriMas, Rapak had to move quickly from the ERP software they had been using since 2013. Part of the agreement with their parent company, Liqui-Box, was that Rapak had to be off its systems before the deal could close. This created significant pressure for the Rapak team to ensure that the project was completed quickly so as to not hold up the sale. The target timeline was 10 weeks. 

“Time was the biggest concern. We knew it would override everything, even the project scope, if we couldn’t get it done on time,” explains Chris Somodji, Warehouse and Systems Manager at Rapak.

Fortunately, Chris had met some members of the QAD Services team before. 

“Even though they introduced some new consultants on this project, I had a high level of confidence in the quality of the QAD team.” But then came the global pandemic, which meant team members and outside consultants couldn’t travel to support the implementation.

Although the company had some experience running projects with several of the team members contributing from remote sites, this was the first project where the entire team would be remote. Luckily, several members of the project team had been involved in ERP implementation projects in the past, so they had a good idea of what to expect.

As an additional challenge, not only did Rapak need to entirely carve out its business from the Liqui-Box solutions, they also needed to include years of accumulated financial and transactional history to ensure that it could operate effectively as part of TriMas.

The Solution: QAD Adaptive ERP

The QAD team jumped into action to help ensure Rapak met its goal despite the constraints. Together, the teams decided to have short, focused daily meetings to make sure everything was on track. ​“Using an agenda for the meetings helped ensure that the meetings didn’t take up too much time while still keeping the project on track, and scheduling the calls early in the day made it easier to get everyone involved,” said Somodji.

The team from QAD suggested using QAD Adaptive ERP’s built-in multiple company capabilities to set up a new business entity on the Liqui-Box system. The new business entity would represent the ​“carved out” company and would include all the financial and transactional history Rapak needed to hit the ground running as a division of TriMas.

Once the system implementation for the new entity was completed and tested, it was a simple matter to create a new Rapak environment in the QAD Cloud. ​“QAD has really good cloud managers,” said Somodji.

When asked about working with the QAD team on a remote project, Somodji said, ​“The technical team from the QAD Cloud was very responsive. And the QAD Financials consultant we worked with was knowledgeable and helpful.”

The Results: QAD Adative Implementation Benefits

The Rapak project was completed on time and within its originally planned scope. Said Somodji, ​“I’m happy we were able to deliver a difficult project on time. We had very few internal resources, but our strong and supportive QAD project team helped make up for that. I’d call this a very successful project.”

Somodji added, ​“Doing the project remotely created some initial stress, but it worked out well. Even if we had an onsite implementation team, the project quality wouldn’t have been any different.” 

When it comes to lessons learned, Somodji said, ​“For this project, remote implementation worked out well. We stayed focused and didn’t get distracted. I would absolutely recommend daily status calls using a focused agenda to stay on track.”

Another factor that helped the project run smoothly was to break the team into smaller, more focused sub-groups. That way, people could leave a call early or skip a meeting altogether if there wasn’t anything on the agenda they needed to address. 

“Respecting other people’s time was a core part of the project,” said Somodji. ​“The remote implementation method helped to reduce the stress of frequent travel for meetings and actually helped us focus on the project. The short, daily agenda-driven meetings helped instill a degree of discipline as well.”

When asked about future plans, Somodji noted, ​“Right now we’re taking a breather and familiarizing ourselves with the systems. Even though business is very good, we have a lot of new business challenges to deal with.”