Berner Food & Beverage was looking for smart ways to transform and grow its business. The company needed technology solutions to manage inventory and costing, and improve plant utilization. Approaching full capacity and with an ambitious 5yr growth plan, the company wanted to improve throughput efficiencies and reduce performance variances.

Cardinal Carryor had been using a Unix-based software called MTA since 1978. However, the software company dropped support and subsequently went out of business. The legacy software wasn’t good at extracting information, making reporting difficult. The company needed a new software solution that could provide robust analytics and reporting capabilities. The employees liked the ease of use of the current software, but the lack of an audit trail and difficulty in understanding what was happening in the software made it necessary for a change.

Before the implementation of the Respond solution, AXA Insurance was struggling to meet internal service levels. The company was also facing difficulties in capturing complaints and feedback from various parts of the organisation. This was a significant challenge as it hindered the company's ability to effectively manage and respond to customer feedback, which is crucial in the insurance industry where customer satisfaction can significantly impact the company's reputation and bottom line.

Bay Valley Foods, a leading provider of shelf-stable foods, was facing spiraling material costs and increasing competition in its private-label food business. The company needed to gain enough efficiency to increase capacity, streamline costs, and avoid unnecessary capital expenditures. The challenge was to find a solution that could help them achieve these goals without incurring additional costs.

Bergendahls Food, one of the larger retail trading companies in Sweden, was facing a challenge in their supply chain operation. The company, which operates in the Food, Fashion, and Home Deco sectors, needed a new real-time based supply chain operation to increase efficiency and delivery precision. The existing system was not able to keep up with the rapid growth of the company, which has 4,000 employees in six countries and generates a revenue of 1 billion Euro. The challenge was to find a solution that could modernize and automate their central warehouse, improving their overall supply chain operation.

The Original Cakerie's biggest challenge was the absence of a single, integrated system, which created data silos and a lack of overall data visibility across departments. TOC initially used many internally built applications to run its business (including Great Plains for financials), but these home grown systems were not able to sustain the company's rapid growth.

Stryker Osteosynthesis, a provider of reconstructive, trauma and spinal products in the medical technology industry, was facing challenges in managing its supply chain. The company was struggling with high expectations from customers requiring 24/7 service levels on practically all product offerings, volatility in demand, aligning supply to demand in an ever-changing supply chain, and ensuring suppliers have timely visibility of requirements. The company was also facing issues with inventory quality and delays in product availability. Without strong supply chain visibility, Stryker was unable to optimize its operational effectiveness and efficiencies. The company was experiencing the bullwhip effect, which stems from incorrect forecasts and created additional supply chain challenges. Stryker’s operational efficiency suffered from inconsistent inbound/outbound performance and manufacturing loads, hindering the company’s ability to operate a stable, uniform-capacity load required for optimized process efficiencies.

Aurora Organic Dairy, a supplier and packager of private-label store-brand organic dairy products, was facing significant operational inefficiencies. They were not effectively analyzing their downtime data, which led to missed opportunities for improvement and cost savings. One of the major issues was the resin loss team losing about $25,000 a month. The company lacked the necessary software and processes to properly track this loss, leading to a significant financial drain.

AXA Insurance, one of the largest insurers in the UK, was facing challenges in managing customer feedback. The company was receiving approximately 1,200 complaints per month across various business units. They needed a reliable system to manage this feedback and use the data for the operational benefit of the company. The company wanted to adhere to its internal service level targets, which included a turnaround time for acknowledgment of complaints within 24 hours. They also wanted to track the resolution of complaints at the 20 or 40-day point to see how many have been resolved within the target period.

Berner Foods, a leading supplier of quality food products, was facing several challenges. The company lacked complete information from the shop floor, which prevented them from identifying and addressing root causes of inefficiencies. They were also struggling with capacity constraints, as they were unable to determine the root causes of production inefficiency and capacity constraints. This lack of visibility was restricting their capacity and business growth. Additionally, production personnel were spending hundreds of man-hours every week filling out dozens of forms. Supervisors alone were spending between two and four hours every day on paperwork.

Children’s University Hospital Temple Street, an acute Paediatric Hospital, was facing challenges with promoting quality and managing risk. The hospital aimed to empower all staff to assume responsibility for effective risk management by reporting adverse incidents and complaints to improve the quality of patient care. However, the significant challenges associated with effectively managing risk and promoting quality and safety within a hospital environment prompted Temple Street to extend its Aptean Respond system, making it accessible at ward and departmental level by rolling it out across the hospital.

State Bank of India (SBI) UK, a branch of the largest commercial bank in India, was facing challenges in managing their customer communications due to their rising customer base across ten branches in the UK. The bank needed a system that could streamline their services, consolidate customer information, and offer a rapid and effective service to increase customer retention rates. The system also needed to be flexible to fit the unique needs of SBI UK and offer a high degree of control. The bank wanted to implement the CRM solution in a short time frame and required ongoing support and guidance throughout the implementation process.

Berner Food & Beverage, a leading private-label manufacturer of premium, processed cheese sauces, spreads and toppings, faced several challenges. As a food manufacturer, Berner needed to meet evolving regulatory and customer requirements for food safety and quality. Increased scrutiny from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and other government agencies necessitated a proven system to ensure compliance with numerous different regulations, such as the Bioterrorism Act of 2002. In addition, the company needed a broad-reaching technology infrastructure with the flexibility to help the company enter new markets, such as consumer packaged goods, all while supporting Berner’s lean manufacturing practices. As a private-label manufacturer, Berner constantly battles tight margins, necessitating maximum efficiency, visibility and productivity in its manufacturing operations.

In 2012, the Financial Services Authority (FSA) in the UK announced that it would hand over its powers to a new regulatory body in the Financial Sector - the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA). With stricter regulations surrounding complaints management on the way, RSA used the opportunity to overhaul their Customer Relations function. The goal was to make RSA the market leader within complaints handling by restructuring the teams involved, changing the accepted norms and giving their staff the right software to get the job done. RSA implemented what was known as The Complaints Handling Integration Project (CHIP), a full scale review of RSA’s complaints handling at a root and branch level. This consisted of three separate parts: People, Processes and Technology. While reviewing people and processes, RSA re-designed how they handled complaints to comply with the new regulations, and also to comply with their own internal best practice system.

Equipment Depot, a trusted brand in material handling equipment since 1951, consists of five different independent operating companies located throughout North America. Each operating company has a different product mix and its own unique approach to its market. Its parent company, Pon Holdings of North America, had merged the operations of the five different business units under the Equipment Depot brand and started to work towards standardization of the business tools and processes used at each of them. Central to that effort was their plan to adopt a new ERP platform. They needed a software system that could handle the complexity of their operations. Replacing the software that runs an entire business is not an insignificant challenge. This is made more difficult when a company is replacing multiple vendor offerings and homegrown tools in one shot. Equipment Depot wanted to make sure whatever system they adopted was going to be future-proofed and based on a trusted brand in software.

AAA WCNY's transactional systems and manual processes did not capture member information or feedback effectively, which led to data inconsistencies and inadequate visibility into member needs. The organization was struggling to provide consistent and efficient member service due to these limitations. The lack of a comprehensive system to manage member relationships was hindering their ability to effectively serve their members and convert interactions into transactions.

Ahlsell, a leading wholesaler in the Nordic region, was seeking to implement a new CRM system. The company's primary focus is on electrical, plumbing, and HVAC supplies, tools, and equipment. The challenge was to find a system that would help its sales agents and sales managers achieve better alignment with senior management objectives. The company needed a solution that was flexible, easy to integrate with other supporting systems, and user-friendly.

Faurecia's Columbus, Indiana operation, which specializes in the design and prototyping of automotive and heavy equipment exhaust systems, was facing several challenges. They were relying on an outdated DOS-based system and a lot of spreadsheets for managing production and inventory. The lack of a modern system made it difficult for them to control their inventory and accurately predict when a job would be ready to ship. The prototyping shop was always under pressure to deliver quickly, and every job was different. This made it challenging to handle the jobs and the paperwork. Furthermore, new orders were likely to disrupt any production schedule they already had in place.

St. James’s Place Wealth Management, a FTSE 100 company, was struggling with managing their financial crime prevention cases. They were using a combination of Excel spreadsheets and email to manage their case workload. The case data was spread across multiple spreadsheets, making it difficult to find critical information. The manual process of logging and tracking cases was inefficient and prone to errors. The team had limited ability to control access to sensitive information, which was not ideal for storing the sensitive information found in financial crime cases. The team needed to pull Management Information (MI) and reports based on the data in their spreadsheets, which was time-consuming, subject to human error, and resulted in inconsistencies.

Reading Bakery Systems, a company that designs and builds processing lines for snack products, was facing several challenges. The company was relying on home-grown programs that were unable to provide the information and control needed for effective operation and growth. The company's old business system lacked the necessary functionalities to run the business, leading to the development of their own procedures and programs to address these deficiencies. The new system needed to include scheduling functionality capable of tracking complex production jobs, as well as multi-job projects, keeping all activities coordinated and properly scheduled. Costing and financial management also needed to recognize both individual jobs and entire projects for proper control and accounting. Given the need to engineer, build and test lines, planning and scheduling were also critically important requirements. Reading needed a fully indented bill of material (BOM) as part of an integrated CAD and ERP system. Moreover, when scheduling and releasing jobs and sub-jobs to production, Reading wanted to flatten the BOMs. This challenging combination of requirements would all need to be a part of the system Reading ultimately chose.

Yale/Chase had some very specific challenges to solve with a new ERP solution. The primary need was to make sure that they could manage parts, sales, services and rentals in one system. On the rental side of their business, they needed a better view on their equipment availability tree so that they could better optimize booking schedules. On the services side, they wanted to make sure they could engage their technicians and get back accurate data and reports. They also needed to decrease the manual effort associated with stocking parts for consignment and service vans. From an operations perspective, they wanted to do a better job of optimizing preventative maintenance. Finally, they wanted to roll up their KPI’s so that the finance and leadership team had better insight into the performance of the whole business.

ASK Chemicals, a leading global supplier of phenolic resins, faced significant challenges due to its outdated and fragmented data management system. The company, with over 2,000 employees worldwide and 18 production facilities, was struggling to merge data from different facilities located in various countries. Each facility had a mix of on-premise installations and best-of-breed software, which made it difficult to create a unified global operational base. The leadership team identified several issues, including poor performance, lack of scalability leading to higher costs, suboptimal cybersecurity, delayed response times, and other platform limitations that hindered innovation efforts. The company needed a solution that would not only address these challenges but also lay the foundation for a new digital business model.

Ahlsell, a leading trading company in plumbing, heating, and electrical supplies, faced several challenges as it sought to expand its business. The company's aggressive growth strategy involved acquiring local businesses in strategic geographies and product segments. Each acquisition brought new business practices and established IT solutions, making it difficult to achieve synergies. Ahlsell also struggled with creating uniform business processes across different countries and customer types. The company lacked integration between sales, order processing, purchasing, logistics, invoicing, and distribution. Additionally, Ahlsell had to manage an extremely broad product assortment, which was becoming increasingly complex as the company expanded. The company needed a solution that could support its growth, streamline its operations, and provide transparency across its sales and supply chain.

Lakeside Foods, a privately held private label food processor, was facing challenges in maintaining its industry-leading status due to escalating raw material costs and increased competitive pressures. The company identified high mechanical downtime levels and manual quality assurance processes as barriers to improved performance. Furthermore, Lakeside lacked actionable intelligence, which prevented plant personnel from identifying line problems in real time and taking appropriate action. This situation was detrimental to the company's efficiency and productivity, and it was clear that a solution was needed to overcome these challenges.

Litehouse Foods, the second largest manufacturer of refrigerated salad dressings, marinades, and dips in North America, was facing a significant challenge. The company was experiencing growth but was struggling to accommodate this expansion without incurring the prohibitive costs of infrastructure investments. They needed a solution that would allow them to scale their operations efficiently and cost-effectively.

Nanso, one of Finland's leading fashion companies, was facing challenges in meeting new delivery requirements from leading fashion retailers. The company was dealing with many manual routines that resulted in low productivity and quality issues. Additionally, Nanso was operating several different ERP systems, which further complicated their operations. The need for a more efficient and streamlined system was evident to improve their supply chain operations.

Haynes Wire Company was struggling with an outdated and inadequate incumbent system that was increasingly unable to manage and provide access to the information needed to effectively operate its growing and expanding business. The company had a lack of information on per-order costs, which was a serious concern in such a competitive field. The order setup was cumbersome and had to be redone for each new order. The legacy system’s minimal reporting and tracking capabilities and lack of routing history left the company with little in the way of information tools to run the business.

Universal Forest Products operates 130 facilities worldwide, with each location acting as an independent operation. Initially only one plant had a CMMS/EAM system, a few locations had paper work order systems, but most had no system in place at all. Maintenance staff at the sites varied as well, ranging from one or two individuals to a team of 15 to 20. The lack of a formalized preventive maintenance system was having an impact on productivity in the plants. Unexpected breakdowns were causing costly repairs and overtime expenses. There was no precise method available to management to identify maintenance expenditures. With more sophisticated equipment being introduced in the plants, it became vital that the equipment be maintained to the manufacturers’ recommendations in order to preserve warranties and realize the expected increases in productivity.

Northland Fishing Tackle, a leading producer of premium quality fishing gear, was facing challenges with its distribution system. The company's supply chain was not fully integrated and the information they needed to make decisions was not readily available. They realized that in order to maintain their growth they needed an integrated back-end supply chain management system that was as great as their front-end products. They were looking for a system that had proven the ability to provide a fast ROI for their customers so that Northland could quickly see the benefits of upgrading their supply chain software. More specifically, they wanted better tracking of both their sales and expenses in order to better understand how the company was performing. They sought to be able to track both sales and expenses by customer, product, and salesperson. On the inventory side they wanted a better way to manage and track their SKUs and inventory costs to get a better gauge of their true costs and total inventory counts.

Litehouse Foods, a leading manufacturer of refrigerated salad dressings, cheeses, dips, sauces, cider, and freeze dried herbs, was operating under a paper-based system across their four production facilities. They were monitoring and recording metrics like downtime manually. Their existing system of record made the creation of reports difficult and offered little real-time visibility, causing them to overlook a substantial amount of downtime. At the time, Lithouse had over 400 downtime codes per line and an impression that they were operating at a much higher utilization and OEE than they actually were. It was this manual process that drove them to seek out a solution that would eliminate the need for paper, while simultaneously providing opportunities to optimize performance and eliminate errors.