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Founded in 1987, Butcher’s Pet Care Ltd. is an independent pet food manufacturer, producing the leading dog food brand, Butcher’s, as well as Classic cat food and Olli dry cat food. Butcher’s Pet Care produces food of the highest quality, using only natural ingredients to ensure superior taste and perfectly balanced, complete meals for pets. All products are available in supermarkets, pet shops, and convenience stores across the UK. Butcher’s Pet Care has implemented IFS Applications as its core ERP system. Delivered on-time and within budget, the investment provides a complete business management system with advanced forecasting and demand planning capabilities. Customer service support is also benefiting from increased visibility and seamless connectivity between sales, production and the warehouse. Production at Butcher’s is a 24-hour process, running continuously, five days a week. The IFS system introduces additional facilities, such as constraint-based scheduling, which will allow Butcher’s to achieve more efficient production cycles. Customer orders are usually placed at short notice. It is a demand-driven sector where fulfillment requires an efficient supply chain that delivers the correct amounts of the right product into the stores—on time and fully compliant with shelf-life specifications. Traditionally, production planning is based on historic sales, overlaid by company marketing strategies. Very little information is available from the customer until the order is actually placed. Forecast and demand planning involve complex judgments, and these are becoming increasingly complicated as the company strives to make its products ever more appealing in this highly discerning and competitive market. Insufficient Support from Legacy System
Butcher’s Pet Care systems legacy was a basic stock-warehousing system, coupled with financial ledgers and a customer sales order processing capability. A separate system was used for forecasting. Other key functions were supported by solutions based on Word and Excel spreadsheets. Project Manager, Jeff Martins says, “Nothing was linked, and information was often re-keyed and duplicated. Transferring a sales forecast into a production plan or financial forecast was time-consuming and unreliable. “Designed initially and tailored for meat processing, the previous system did not support manufacturing operations. We needed a unified business management system, and preferably one that could be based around a standard vanilla format to suit our current and ongoing requirements.”
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