BatchMaster gives SynergyLabs the tools they need to achieve process improvements

SynergyLabs is a USA manufacturer of animal health and veterinary care products, headquartered in Florida. They moved their manufacturing to North Carolina in 2020. IT Manager Jerry Hunt says their business took off under Covid-19 lockdown as more people bought or adopted pets and had the time to pamper them.

Their current ERP system, Sage 50 with MISys, was discrete-oriented where they needed a process-flow system. It also lacked the ability to define individual inventory locations or track lot numbers – all that was a manual, paper-based effort.

When asked about their expectations from their new BatchMaster ERP with SAP Business One system, Jerry listed the following:

• We want to be at a 99% inventory accuracy – we are not there yet, but that’s what we are striving to do.
• Scanning capability. We want to have these mobile technologies so that when we are moving inventory from one location to another, we want to take care of that transaction at the time it happens and not deal with it after the fact. We definitely want to use the WMS and MES system that comes with BatchMaster, on the tablets and scanners we have purchased, to improve those inventory processes and accuracy.
• Reduction in paper work in recording lot numbers. Because we do have lot-controlled product, we have to be able to respond to any kind of incident with a product, like a recall. Today that is a manual, tedious process because you have to go shuffling through papers and look for scanned documents to see where people have hand-written lot numbers on papers.
• Automation of the planning and scheduling process is another big challenge identified. We are trying to get our processes aligned around a true MPS & MRP style planning system. We are excited to be adding the Production Scheduling Workbench to our system to schedule the batches and tanks and bottling lines.
• Improved Support. Sage support required us to call, join a queue, and wait until someone was available to assist. That could involve 3 hours on the phone just to get in the queue.

Said Jerry “Now, when we put BatchMaster in, is that going to happen? BatchMaster can’t do that in and of itself, you’ve got to have processes to support that. That’s why we are working with your implementation team hard to define our processes, because we don’t want to just do an installation, we want to do an implementation. The relationship with the BatchMaster Team is going great. Our implementation team are very sharp – they know the product well”.

With Covid-19, the company wanted to have more remote capability, if people had to work from home. This is why they chose to operate BatchMaster ERP with SAP Business One in the Cloud. Jerry likes the idea of not having an infrastructure to have to keep up, not having to worry about Servers, Backups, Hardware, Disk Space, etc. of having someone else dealing with that for them. They have an expectation around support and 99.9 % up-time per cloud standards.

Asked what BatchMaster ERP with SAP Business One means for SynergyLabs at a Corporate level, Mr Hunt said “BatchMaster represents for us a way to achieve process improvements, by giving us the tools we need to improve the overall business. This is going to allow us to grow our business. We are hampered in our growth because our systems are so limited. I see so many opportunities to use this system as a tool to improve all of our business processes.

I’m excited to find a system that has the full-blown capabilities from order entry to out-the-door shipping, with QC and everything taken into account. I’m excited to have all these tools available to us”.