Bio-Botanica partners with BatchMaster Software to meet the high demand for holistically balanced botanical extracts
Bio-Botanica® is a family-owned and operated company, specializing in botanicals for over 45 years. The company has grown to be a leading global manufacturer and supplier of over 500 botanical extracts used in the personal care & cosmetic, food & beverage, flavor & fragrance, and supplement and nutraceutical industries.
BatchMaster Software’s end to end ERP solution, BatchMaster ERP, was recently purchased by Bio-Botanica® to streamline and scale up the development and production of their custom blended solid, semi-solid, powdered, and liquid products, as well as grow its own line of consumer products sold through retailers under the Nature’s Answer, Holistic Balance, Gencuetic, and Woodstock brands.
Bio-Botanica® houses one of the oldest and most impressive private Herbariums in the United States. This priceless resource contains over 800 authenticated herbal plant samples, as they appear in nature, and have been obtained from all corners of the world. Authenticated samples from the Herbarium serve as the standard by which all incoming raw material is judged. BatchMaster ERP’s sample vendor inspection, document management and other inbound quality features will ensure all ingredients meet their high standards.
Though its advanced production capabilities, BatchMaster ERP will optimize the planning, scheduling and management of a variety of custom extracting, blending, spray-drying, vacuum drying, and milling processes, then ensure the quality, integrity and purity of products by employing it comprehensive QC & QA features. In addition, the solution’s ‘built in’ best practices follow strict GMP, SOP & GLP procedures and facilitates the maintenance of the company’s Kosher and NSF certifications.
Interview with the Bio-Botanica® Project Team
We appreciated having the entire Bio-Botanica implementation team on a web conference to discuss their BatchMaster ERP project and their expectations. Below are their responses to our questions.
What led to your decision to pursue new software?
When we started to explore the idea of implementing a new ERP, our system at that time was around 10 years old and was no longer fully supported by the vendor. Over the years we had bolted on numerous third party and in-house developed systems to help close a number of gaps between our business processes requirements and the capabilities of our ERP system. This ultimately led to an entanglement of data distributed among multiple sources, painful amounts of manual entry, and laborious paper-based processes.
We sought to find something that specialized in process manufacturing that parallelly supported our myriad of business requirements in a suitable and efficient manner. The forefront of importance was not just a modern ERP but an integrated, multifaceted system that could house and ultimately drive our business practices.
What were the top reasons behind the selection of BatchMaster?
BatchMaster’s industry specific nutraceutical solution really struck a chord for us. It all felt very familiar. As we continued to learn more and dive deeper into the capabilities of the system, more and more boxes were checked from our list. Wrapping around SAP B1 enables an elegance that encompasses the full-bodied system that we were aiming for. This allows us to reach our goal of being able to follow industry leading practices in process manufacturing while fully supporting the other arms of our business (R&D, Quality, Sales & Marketing, Warehousing & Distribution, Purchasing & Planning, Accounting) all under one roof within one modern, centralized system.
What are the company’s expectations for the software?
We anticipate decreases in duplicative processes, data redundancies, and manual, paper-based transactions. We expect full capabilities within scheduling and planning, warehousing and inventory management, paperless manufacturing, and barcode execution. We anticipate the software to replace our current CRM, LIMS, EQMS, WMS, and possibly our business intelligence and reporting tools.
We are expecting a drastic increase in data visibility and clarity between all aspects of our business, including full 360 views of customer and vendor history, forward and backward traceability of all products and components, testing specifications and results, and inventory quantities and values between multiple warehouses.
We anticipate the entire lifecycle of an item, from inception to completion, to live and be housed within BatchMaster. This would start at the R&D phase and move through the workflows within the system to approval and eventually manufacturing and distribution.
We spent several months going through our specific business requirements with the BatchMaster team and outlined key workflow processes. We expect those workflow diagrams and outlines to be respected, supported, and implemented accordingly. We feel confident that we have done our due diligence together as a team (both BatchMaster and Bio-Botanica) in ensuring that we are best fit for one another. We are excited, confident, and eager to join forces with BatchMaster and begin leveraging this solution.
