Case Study: Pet Foods Manufacturing | S-Metric, Inc.
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Case Study: Pet Foods Manufacturing

Client Profile

  • Industry: Pet Foods Manufacturing
  • Annual Revenue: Over $500 million
  • Sales Model: B2B Distribution Make to Stock & Make to Order Model
  • Integration Channels: Implementing Shopify B2B models.
  • Delivery Operations: It delivers LTL models internally and drop-ship to clients.

Challenges

Following these acquisitions, Primal Pet Foods faces the challenge of integrating multiple companies and consolidating their financials & Operations These challenges included:

  • ERP Consolidation: Primal Pet Foods needs to unify various subsidiaries different ERPs into a single platform, specifically migrating them all back to Business Central.
  • Intercompany Transactions: Complex intercompany transactions caused errors due to dual bookings across companies.
  • Process Manufacturing Cost Roll-up: Inadequate setup of Bills of Materials (BOMs) led to incorrect standard costs.
  • Lack of Master Resource Planning: Insufficient demand and supply chain forecasting resulted in inefficient raw material management and frequent stock shortages.
  • Reporting Delays: Multiple investors require real-time reports, but the company currently.
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Objectives

The company set clear objectives for the ERP implementation:

  • Unified ERP: All Subsidiary needs to use same ERP so system will be managed more efficiently and reduce the integration risk.
  • Focus on Cost Accountings: Improve order processing, inventory management, and financial reporting.
  • Forecasting: Provide seamless interactions across channels.
  • Enhanced Data Visibility: Provide seamless interactions across channels.
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Implementation Approach

Our implementation strategy involves dividing our efforts across three key teams: Accounting Services, Supply Chains, and Power BI.

  • Accounting Services:
    • Their primary focus is on successful consolidation and migration of legacy systems.
    • They ensure accurate order replenishment for procurement processes.
  • Web Front-End: The Magento team developed a web front-end for customer interaction.
  • Integration Development: Integration developers used modern APIs (such as JSON) to connect various systems.
  • Database Optimization: The DBA optimized the data infrastructure to handle concurrent users and API calls.
  • Application Development: Application developers ensured that functions and data were managed correctly within the existing workflow.
  • Quality Assurance (QA): We have divided DEV QA & UAT QA, which ensure that we get the least surprise for production deployments.
    • User Acceptance Testing (UAT): Clients participated in UAT, validating the system against real-world scenarios.
    • Development QA (Scrum): The development team focused on rigorous testing during development sprints.

Deployment Strategy

  • Segmented Deployments: To minimize downtime, deployments were carefully planned and segmented.
  • QA Environments: We set up DEV & STAGE & Production environments for every single integration component. In that way, we can have a full test script performed in DEV & STAGE and minimize for go live surprise.

Results and Lessons Learned

  • Positive Outcomes:
    o Multi-Company consolidations.
    o Process Manufacturing with cost roll-up.
    o Fast turnaround for report generations
  • Documentation Skills: Documentations & Logs are important to trace where things went wrong and prevent making mistakes again.
  • Unique Test Environment: Maintain a separate test environment for integration testing.

    Conclusion: We’ve learned that having a short-clean version of meeting summary and QA documentation helps and improve the quality of products.  Getting a test environments always helps the project to be successful in long-run.

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