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Kettle Foods Ltd. is the UK operation of Kettle Foods, Inc. The company started in Oregon as part of the natural foods movement and its Norwich plant opened in January 1989. Its best known product is Kettle Chips, which is one of the fastest growing snack brands in the UK, currently worth approximately £30m. The UK company is experiencing rapid growth as the market for food products using natural ingredients expands rapidly. It needs systems that are error-free and efficient so that it can maintain and improve its quality of Customer Service in an extremely competitive marketplace.
The problem
Kettle Foods started small in the UK but has grown quickly. It found itself running a large and dynamic business using a sales order processing system and financials together with a number of fragmented systems based on spreadsheets. These systems were not integrated and the lack of central control meant that overall there was inflexibility and the duplication of effort led to errors and a waste of resources. The company needed to become flexible and more efficient in order
to handle the increasing complexity of an expanding business. The solution
Kettle Foods wanted an integrated system that was user friendly with a minimum requirement for training. It had to be flexible and be able to cater for the company's growth potential providing support for decision making by using information that
was reliable, accurate and immediately available. Implemented in two stages, the first used IFS for financials, order processing, inventory management and purchasing. In the second stage IFS is used to add demand planning, MPR and HR. IFS was selected because of its component-based
architecture which makes it flexible and easy to use, with the best external interfaces to other systems. Implementation
The first priority was to understand the company's processes, so it got together a team of key people from all relevant business functions to work with IFS consultants. Team members were knowledgeable, good communicators who could get buy-in from
the user community and who would do user training. "The implementation process was very fast with a June start and going live on 1st October," says Lyn Daplyn, Finance Director at Kettle Foods. "Kettle Foods' systems team, working with IFS, drove the implementation and there was a great deal of
commitment from its key people, who spent 70-80% of their time on the project." A new Head of Supply Chain was appointed whose first task was full-time management of the IFS project. Implementation was driven throughout by the company's desire to improve and maintain its level of Customer Service, and with this dedicated
direction the first phase went live in record time.
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