Top Cut Foods, one of Australia’s leading meat companies, has achieved significant cost savings and reduced time and resources for maintenance and support through a single ERP solution from food and drink IT specialist CSB-System.
Established in 1981, Top Cut Foods is a specialist butcher with a long-standing network of selected farmers and meat processors and a range of well-known premium brands of beef, veal, lamb and pork. The company has seven fully owned and operated facilities in Australia, with a national delivery network, plus four sales offices in Japan and one in Korea.
Top Cut Foods had been using three existing ERP systems from different vendors to cover all aspects of its operation. However, this approach was becoming increasingly unsustainable. The three ERPs effectively tripled the time needed for maintenance and support and created data silos that prevented the company from improving efficiencies. The technology was also falling behind and no longer provided the cutting-edge best practice required for a smart meat plant.
Key requirements for the new ERP system were to optimise operations, increase automation, make processes more transparent and reduce costs. Critical to this was a solution with strong Business Intelligence capabilities that could effectively combine the systems used on the manufacturing floor with the finance department.
The CSB solution, selected by Top Cut Foods after an in-depth assessment of the international market, provides a modular structure that has enabled the company to build a system to fit its needs. In particular, it has allowed the integration of all operations, from receipt of supplies to sales, including Finance and Accounting.
“The benefit of having a stable system has helped us to reduce onsite IT resources for maintenance and support to almost zero,” said Top Cut Foods CFO Charles Geraghty.
“The fact that CSB has the resources to provide local support in Australia made all the difference. Without that, it would have been problematic to deploy and run the system efficiently.”
The higher level of integration has improved processes, helping Top Cut Foods to achieve its long-term operational goals. Equally important, the single platform provides a Single Source of Truth (SSOT) that eliminates duplicate representations of data. Users now have access to the same information stored in one location.
At the same time, the resources needed for maintenance and support have drastically decreased. There are now fewer than five people for five sites, working with the local CSB support team.
Thanks to all these improvements, Top Cut Foods has been able to lower its operational costs.
“When a system works and embraces new and best-practice technology, it will always save people’s time and business money,” concluded Geraghty. “If you don’t stay abreast of best practice, you will fall behind and become increasingly uncompetitive.”
Innovations in Food (& Beverage) Processing & Packaging is a quarterly magazine distributed globally both in Print and Digital formats. www.innovationsfood.com. Twitter: @Innovfoodtech. Instagram: @innovationsinfoodtechnology. Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/terry-prior52
