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“With SYSPRO, we have visibility into materials at what price, what the market trend is and what should we do as we plan for the future. All of this information is now at my fingertips, and I can better negotiate pricing with suppliers for the next year.”
Bhargav Bhatt – VP Supply Chain, Aspire Pharmaceuticals
Customer Profile
Aspire Pharmaceuticals, headquartered in Somerset, New Jersey is a global leader in soft gelatin manufacturing. The company’s stringent procurement operations, backed with rigorous analytics and testing infrastructure, provide custom solutions for the company’s clients from concept to delivery. Aspire offers custom softgels in any size, shape and color. From one-ingredient oils to complex multi-ingredient fills, every step of the capsule manufacturing process has up-to-date standard operating procedure guides and adheres to the Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) put forth by the US Food and Drug Administration.
The Challenges
Prior to implementing an ERP system, Aspire Vice President Bhargav Bhatt’s first priority was to establish engineering, manufacturing and batch control processes within their company to provide a foundation for ERP selection. Once that was implemented, Bhatt and the Aspire team determined that SYSPRO ERP Software met their requirements for Lot Control, Traceability and Batch Processing. SYSPRO fit the requirement to help Aspire process data to meet the Goods Manufacturing Practice (GMP) guidelines recommended by the FDA. SYSPRO ERP was also selected to help Aspire Pharmaceuticals improve visibility into the supply chain, eliminate inadequate profit margins and improve inventory accuracy.
The Solution
After selecting SYSPRO ERP Software in 2016, Aspire was able to implement in four months. Aspire currently runs a full suite of SYSPRO ERP modules, managing everything from manufacturing and distribution to financials. In addition, they have implemented barcoding and have established MRP driven by sales demand.
The Outcome
Before SYSPRO, Aspire had inaccurate KPIs in inventory accuracy, product margin and total expense. After implementing SYSPRO, one of their main areas of focus was to improve visibility into true product, manufacturing and operation costs. With SYSPRO, Aspire’s management team has full real-time visibility into each product margin at month-to-date and year-to-date. The system also gives them visibility to estimate what margins they can expect for the remainder of the year, allowing them to plan accordingly with more control of what products they should pursue or eliminate as they continue manufacturing. This clear visibility helped Aspire quickly achieve an inventory accuracy rate of 98%.
SYSPRO also had a significant impact on Aspire’s materials management by providing better visibility into pricing of all manufacturing materials, operating costs and current market trends. This helps them drill- down even more into true product margin. “With SYSPRO, we have visibility into materials at what price, what the market trend is and what should we do as we plan for the future,” said Bhatt. “All of this information is now at my fingertips, and I can better negotiate pricing with suppliers for the next year.” Based on their initial analysis, Aspire has already saved $750,000 in 2017 alone in procurement spend, which provided the ROI into implementing SYSPRO. In addition, they are already seeing a 20% growth this year and predicting 20% to 30% growth in 2018.
Now that they are more than a year into the consolidated system, Aspire has been able to implement additional process change through continuous improvement, which SYSPRO applications have been able to identify. In addition, they will start to introduce a more formalized Quality process in 2018, as they implement Quality for SYSPRO as a “Phase 2” of their ERP implementation.
“One year after implementation, we have really moved forward. In fact, we are looking at 20% growth in nutritional business this year, and 30% expected for next year. This is happening because the foundation for our business is now set with SYSPRO.”
