Golden Acres in Manufacturing & Logistics IT

The Manufacturers Best Friend

Exel EFACS provides business growth backbone for per food manufacturer, Golden Acres

Golden Acres is a manufacturer and packer of high quality, branded pet food products. Its commitment to providing unparalleled flexibility and service levels to over 250 different customers extends from sourcing specialist raw materials and packaging to assisting with the nutritional requirement of products and their positioning in the market place. Golden Acres achieves this through using only the highest quality raw materials, an ongoing investment in research and development, and the use of the most up to date production methods, machinery and IT When it came to replacing its existing ERP system, the only solution that met with the company’s exacting standards was EFACS E/8 from

Exel Computer Systems. Flexible approach

Golden Acres manufactures on a considerable scale, with target production levels of over 2000 tonnes each week, from its single manufacturing site. The company has 3 state of the art extruders running 24/7, which lead to 12 packing lines. Distribution and packing is also aided by 4 satellite facilities. The company also has a highly flexible approach to its customers’ requirements, handling a mixture of Make to Order and Make to Stock. Moreover, the 600 different dry pet foods and over 5000 different stock items can be packed into pack sizes from 30g to 1 tonne In size, enabling Golden Acres to cater for the needs of individual buyers through to large national multiples. “That’s an awful lot of data we have to handle on a daily basis,” said Steven Wheeler, IT project manager for Golden Acres. “And because we are manufacturing product all the time. it’s vital we have complete real time visibility; not just of what is being made and when, but also of what has already been made, where it’s stored, and when it’s due to be dispatched.”

Recent trends towards manufacturing premium and super premium products much of which requires absolute production control, exacting quality standards, and complete traceability – makes it vital that the company’s own IT systems can seamlessly integrate with those of its customers; especially as web ordering becomes more prevalent. Prior to Golden Acres investment III Exel EFACS, the company had been using an established mid-range business solution in conjunction with its own Integrated Management System (lMS). The fact that the business solution used batch transfers for communicating data between itself and IMS had always been identified as a potential weakness, but as the need for real time, and accurate data became ever more prevalent, Golden Acres was continually reducing the batch update times to try and achieve this. Worst of all, the company would lose all the data in any batch where the transfer failed.

Golden Acres believed that any replacement system would ideally have to be browser based and have an SOL database in order for it to be compatible with the company’s own existing database and in order to integrate seamlessly in real-time with the IMS. Wheeler pointed out that it was chairman Roger Bracewell who was instrumental in the decision to choose EFACS. “We’d researched some alternatives but there were few genuine browser based solutions that offered the state of the art technology we required,” said Wheeler. “As soon as Roger saw EFACS, the decision was made. Not only did EFACS provide us with the technology we needed for a real time backbone for our IMS, it also provided us with the flexibility to modify the system to our own way of working, especially concerning the data entry into the system. It also had the functionality to help us with traceability of materials.”

Significant benefits

Implementation commenced shortly after the formal decision to choose EFACS in February 2005, with Golden Acres successfully going live on 28 January 2006. Since then, the company has experienced significant benefits that have made a big impact, right across the business. Above all, the company now has an integrated system that works seamlessly with its own IMS, in real time, which is delivering all the required visibility. This in turn has lead to increased use of IMS due to the accuracy and availability of data from EFACS. The increase in traceability has been pivotal in Golden Acres successfully achieving British Retail Consortium (BRC) Accreditation. Also, the increase in possible stock status options, from on hold or live, to a range of different possibilities has transformed the accuracy and relevance of stock levels. “Now I can see not only what is wrong with the stock that isn’t available, I can see whether it may become useable, and if so, when,” said Wheeler

It is these benefits among many others that have placed Exel EFACS at the centre of Golden Acres’ development plans. Wheeler concluded: “We couldn’t have got this far without EFACS; it has become the underlying backbone of our business growth and will continue to be so.”