Ready Foods

The Company: About Ready Foods

In 1972, Ready Foods began producing Mexican food for restaurants and retail outlets in the Denver area. Over the years, Ready Foods has expanded and evolved from a manufacturer of Mexican food to becoming a custom food processor, producing a wide variety of products for restaurants nationwide. Ready Foods manufactures savory sauces, beans, salsas, soups, dressings, gravies, deli spreads, stuffings, meat and vegetable fillings, and tortillas.

The Situation: Unified System

Previously, Ready Foods was utilizing a UNIX system for 15 years that they simply outgrew. They required a system that would facilitate all process manufacturing and business operations functions in a unified system to stay competitive in their growing industry.

The Solution: ProcessPro ERP

Ready Foods spent over a year reviewing 12 – 15 ERP solutions, narrowing it to six, before selecting ProcessPro as their software of choice. ProcessPro embodied similar characteristics of Ready Foods, in that personal relationships were essential to building strong partnerships. Ready Foods implemented the ProcessPro ERP solution in February 2012. ProcessPro has enabled Ready Foods to save time and increase the accuracy of inventory, eliminate dual data entry and increase quality control standards.

Software Add-on Applications

• Warehouse Management Solution (WMS)

• Dock Scheduler

• Research and Development (R&D)

• Business Intelligence (BI)

The Results: ProcessPro ERP Implementation Benefits

Real-Time Inventory

Ready Foods’ previous system required them to halt operations for 24 hours to manually count inventory levels. They would then spend over a week keying in the data to find where they had lost inventory from one period to the next. This process not only led to a loss in time and money but was unreliable. With the use of ProcessPro’s physical inventory and WMS, they have been able to eliminate the lag time in inventory counts, access real-time inventory updates, and determine on-hand, allocated, and projected inventory levels. ProcessPro has also aided in decreasing the amount of time it takes to produce variance reports. Previously, the reports were taking 3 days to produce and calculate and are now available within 12 hours for Ready Foods to utilize in production planning.

Growth

Ready Foods was experiencing an essential need for a software system that would be able to meet their long-term needs and grow with them. ProcessPro offered a fully customizable ERP software system that could handle their current situation and the expected continued growth. ProcessPro has been able to support Ready Foods’ extensive growth and expansions.

Quality Control

With the use of ProcessPro, this growing food manufacturer is able to control the quality of its products beginning with incoming raw materials, through ingredient manufacturing, all the way to final packaging. Ready Foods’ clients, many of which are national restaurant chains, place high regard on the quality and consistency of their end products. With the help of ProcessPro, they have been able to consistently produce high-quality, fresh products and are able to comply with current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations.

As Ready Foods continues to grow its soup and sauce line of business and capitalize on the expanding Mexican foods market, so will its use of the ProcessPro system. Ready Foods intends to further utilize the extensive capabilities of the BI suite, which will provide them with more accessible and useful data with drill-down capabilities to make better-informed business decisions.