INTRODUCTION
Metarom started producing their signature caramels in 1953 and has been expanding their product lines to include a variety of flavors, extracts, functional ingredients, and vanilla bean ingredients used by food and beverage producers. Metarom USA was founded in 2017 to serve the North American market. As part of the Metarom Group, the US division enjoys global collaboration, supply chain optimization, and a wealth of market insights from every corner of the world.
Today, Metarom employs the native cloud-based, manufacturing application, BME Web, from BatchMaster Software to streamline and scale up operations, while complying with industry regulatory mandates.
Challenge
Metarom employed three disparate applications to run their operations. One of these, the R&D application, properly supported formulation, however, it did not take into account inventory availability when generating batch tickets to the floor. Specifically, the expiration dates of ingredients were not managed, therefore the quality team had to test the ingredients before using them in production, which incurred additional labor costs, time, and caused potential delays in production and order fulfillment.
From an inventory management perspective, plant workers did not know the specific locations in which raw materials, and finished goods were stored or sorted. This lack of visibility led to increased labor costs and time to search for the needed inventory, which further delayed processing and order fulfillment.
Metarom develops customized flavor profiles and therefore needed a solution to support their customer specific requirements, from performing QC tests on their Kosher and organic certified products, to generating customized COA reports. In additions, the solution needed to comply with ever more stringent regulatory mandates set forth by the GHIS/FDA/SQF and GHS/SDS organizations.
To meet Metarom’s exponential growth, management recognized the need to replace their incongruent applications with a single, unified solution to manage inventory, production, and warehousing.
Solution
In their search for a solution, Metarom evaluated SAP, Aptean/Ross, and a few other end-to-end ERP solutions. After the vendor’s product demonstrations, the team felt that BatchMaster’s BME Web application provided the needed functionality and could be integrated to their QuickBooks Online financial application at 1/2 to 1/3 of the price of the other ERP vendor solutions.
Director of Supply Chain, Krissy Fong, led the company’s software evaluation process and the customer side of the implementation project. During implementation, Fong was the project manager, and was the “super user” who led the training effort for the staff. Now into production, she continues to be the “go to person” whenever there is a question about BatchMaster functionality or a need to configure the system to meet a given objective.
“We had a great experience with the BatchMaster implementation, and the support team. Everyone was very knowledgeable, and committed to helping us implement the system as fast as possible”, explains Fong.
Today, the R&D staff continues to use their 3rd party R&D lab app to match existing customer formulas and/or create new ones. Once approved, these formulas are copied into BME Web, where formulas can be analyzed by cost, specific ingredients, labor, and consumable costs, as well as, being assigned QC tests and SOPs. Once approved, these formulas serve as the basis for batch production.
In production, BME Web ensures that the right raw materials are allocated based upon their quality and expiration date status. BME Web controls the picking of ingredients, the ‘make’ and fill’ processes, and the QC testing of the products. The supported processes ensure the proper production of Metarom’s allergen-free, bake-stable, freeze-stable, high-protein, and sugar-free product lines.
“BME Web has automated several manual tasks, including the generation of customer specific COA’s, the printing of various labels during warehousing and production, and the capture and creation of product expiration dates and lot numbers of raw materials and finished goods”, says Krissy Fong, Director of Supply Chain for Metarom.
Comprehensive lot management in BME Web allows Metarom to trace the origin and distribution of their products, as well as, identify and track any quality issues or defects that may arise. This allows them to quickly track, and trace a suspect product, and generate a recall letter, and the bi-directional, graphical lot traceability inquiry connects the dots between processes at a push of a button, to exceed the requirements set by the SQF advanced food safety mandates.
Next Steps
Fong feels that the company is only employing about 60-75% of BME Web’s capabilities at this time. She requested that BatchMaster consultants come onsite, where they evaluated Metarom’s operations, and discussed additional strategies, and configurations that could further optimize the company processes.
“We have been live for 7 months and our users have benefited from increased visibility to our operations and the use of more advanced and automated functions to increase process efficiencies”, states Fong.
Currently, Metarom is configuring, and testing the advanced planning & scheduling modules, MPS & MRP, which will give production, and purchasing the ability to forecast batch jobs, and purchase order, respectively.
An additional module that will be rolled out is the Mobile Warehouse Management module, which will allow the plant floor users to perform receiving, putaway, picking, shipping, and other inventory movement, in addition to adjustment tasks within the facility using any html-browser based device (e.g. gun, smart tablet).
Today, Metarom France provides Metarom USA with SDS labels, and documents. BatchMaster’s SDS module is being considered in order to generate these SDS labels, and documents on demand, and in-house.
Metarom is looking forward to having the BatchMaster consulting team back onsite at the end of their first year live with BME Web to hold a system audit that can uncover further opportunities to enhance user productivity, and system performance.
