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CASE STUDY
Creative Foods Ingredients
CLIENT
PROFILE
Creative Food Ingredients (CFI) supplies baked ingredient products to the food
industry – specifically several product lines of crushed cookies and crumbs, whole
cookies, crumble toppings, crackers and packaged items such as bagged cookies.
Other food processing companies use CFI products in applications that include
the crumble base of cheesecakes, ingredients in candy bars, and as ice cream
flavors. Private label products make up a small percentage of CFI’s business, such
as their manufacturing of specialty crackers for smaller regional stores in the U.S.
CFI employs more than 100 people at their tree nut and peanut-free
manufacturing facility in Perry, NY and another 20 people at their administrative
offices and distribution center in Mississauga, Ontario.
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THE
CHALLENGE
CFI had been making do with a combination of Accpac
and Excel spreadsheets to manage their production and
financial processes, says CFO Jeffrey Arcand, who has
been with the company since 2000. “Those technologies
were not talking to each other, he says, adding that the
search for an ERP began in 2007 to realize their goal of
increasing to 100% operational capacity.
THE
SOLUTION
The company’s chairman had read in an industry
publication that one of CFI’s competitors was
using JustFoodERP, so he forwarded the article
to Arcand. He, in turn, talked with another
JustFoodERP customer, Ray Crews (then an
executive with CF Chefs); the resulting positive
reference and other information solidified CFI’s
decision to investigage JustFoodERP as their sole
ERP provider option.
CFI chose JustFoodERP, says Arcand, largely
because all the functionality their food processing
business needs is “already built-in and in the
JustFoodERP product,” such as lot tracking,
manufacturing, quality management, and more.
“The lot traceability is phenomenal: You
just go to a button and hit ‘trace’ and
you’re done!”
Jeffrey Arcand, CFO
Creative Food Ingredients
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THE
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BENEFITS
For CFI, the key benefit of the JustFoodERP system is
the visibility of processes across the entire company;
after all, with finance, sales and marketing, and other
administrative functions happening in a different
country than the manufacturing, the ability for all
employees at all locations to view the data is ideal,
says Arcand. “We can now limit our previous huge
amount of phone communication; instead our users
can drill down into manufacturing, or administrative,
data on their own.”
chain. “The lot traceability is phenomenal,” he notes.
Arcand also notes that a favored feature of the
JustFoodERP system so far is the ability to do product
tracking backwards and forwards across their supply
scope and our team worked well with JustFoodERP
“You just go to a button and hit ‘trace’ and you’re
done!”
Having received training from JustFoodERP staff on
how to use JetReports to generate various types of
reporting, Arcand says he finds Jet a “great, extremely
useful tool.”
Arcand says he would recommend JustFoodERP to
other food companies. “We kept the project within
to keep the focus so we could finish the first phase of
the implementation on time and on budget.”
THE
FUTURE
The future looks bright – and busy – for the CFI and
JustFoodERP partnership. CFI has eight subsidiary
companies they plan to integrate into their
JustFoodERP system, says Arcand.
SOLUTION SUMMARY
JustFoodERP and Microsoft Dynamics
Locations: Head office and Canadian
distribution center in Mississauga, Ontario;
manufacturing facility in Perry, NY.
JF Modules: Quality Management;
Manufacturing; Finances; JF Floor.
“We kept the project within scope, and
our team worked well with JustFoodERP
to keep the focus so we could finish the
first phase of the implementation on
time and on budget”
Jeffrey Arcand, CFO
Creative Food Ingredients
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