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“We expect the cost benefits generated by the scheduling and labor modelling components alone to realize improved operating expenditure of around $1.5 million to $2 million each year.”
Frank Patton – Chief Financial Officer, Ruprecht
Customer Profile
Established in 1860, Ruprecht is a value-added food solutions company focused on ready-to-eat and ready-to-cook protein products that serve domestic and international customers in the foodservice and retail sectors.
The Business Challenge
Ruprecht’s investment in product innovation has led to rapid growth over the past 10 years. To capitalize on this growth, it needed to include a fully integrated business solution.
The Solution
Through its SYSPRO 8 implementation, Ruprecht has benefited from enhanced ease of use, higher productivity, ease of integration and digital transformation.
The Outcome
SYSPRO has provided Ruprecht with several key ROI metrics, including product costing and a defined production schedule which makes it possible to understand the number of hours it takes to make product in a given manufacturing cell.
Integrating Business Solutions to Support Growth
As one of the oldest food manufacturing companies in the Chicago area, Ruprecht’s customers include wellknown independent restaurants, local and national chains, national and international distributors, retail supermarkets and wholesale clubs.
One of the challenges it was facing was that two different platforms were being used to run the business: QuickBooks and an in-house, custom-developed ERP package.
Frank Patton, Chief Financial Officer of Ruprecht, says the systems were not integrated, leading to time-consuming efforts to align the two. “Neither of the platforms was scalable or well-suited to our need to grow our business,” he says. “As a private equity-based company, we needed a system that could support our growth curve.”
The homegrown ERP package also lacked some of the capabilities critical for success, such as production scheduling, full inventory visibility, manufacturing standard costing and ‘what if’ scenarios. Ruprecht evaluated five different platforms: SYSPRO, Infor, Dynamic AX, Just Food and Sage. After an exhaustive due diligence process, SYSPRO was selected based on its ability to assist Ruprecht with its change management efforts.
“Also, SYSPRO really understands our business and is industry-built,” Patton says.
Tackling Market Disruptions Effectively
SYSPRO has made it easier for Ruprecht to tackle market disruptions effectively. The company’s stable source of supply and ability to maintain healthy inventory levels helps it weather disruptions in both product availability and price. This in turn enables Ruprecht to assist its customers through these challenges.
“This is where the Artificial Intelligence (AI) solution is so important,” Patton says. “It’s taught us to focus on developing a predictive model to guide us on the decision-making process so that we can set ourselves up for success in the future.
“The more we learn about what’s being done with Avanti and SYSPRO 8, the more excited we get. We’ve got to find ways to show value and make our supply chain even more efficient, and AI is the key to achieving that goal so that we can be more agile, not less.”
Optimizing the Power of Predictive Analytics
As part of its digital transformation journey, Ruprecht has set up a data warehouse structure which allows it to pull data to the warehouse from SYSPRO.
“Along with SYSPRO, we’ve built a data lake that has become our front-end platform. It allows us to be product agnostic because I can pull pieces of data together to speed up our decision making or allow us to do a better job of understanding the relationship between non-related data elements,” Patton says.“It means we can do things we were only able to dream of until now.”
Because SYSPRO is built on an open architecture, it gives Ruprecht unlimited flexibility to pull data into the solution and use it strategically. “I’m comfortable that SYSPRO’s architecture will allow us to make decisions on the fly. When we built the connection to the new data lake, we literally pulled every single field and capability out of SYSPRO,” Patton says.
“Our goal is to be a valued partner, a solutions-based food company that provides a high value product. We will achieve it by making the most of our SYSPRO solution our culture,” he says.
“Knowing that we have partners who can do that for us is critical as we look to make the most of whatever opportunities the future may bring.”
