Optimizing growth opportunities with scalable SYSPRO

Accommodate complexities and plans for expansion

Customer

Established in:
Company Size:

Improve stock control and data accuracy

A member of the Bidcorp Food Africa group, Crown National manufactures and distributes food ingredients, packaging, equipment and sausage casings to the meat, poultry, dairy and general food industries. The company has 22 sites across South Africa, a self-managed operation in Zambia and agencies in Zimbabwe and Namibia.

Their Business Challenge

Crown National is on a journey to increase the digitization of its business. As a long-term SYSPRO client, the company’s management was confident that there was a good system platform in place which needed to be driven in the right direction to accommodate the complexities of the business as well as its plans for expansion.

The Solution

Crown National is running SYSPRO 8, from Financials to Inventory Optimization, Material Requirements Planning (MRP), Inventory Bin Maintenance, Point of Sale (POS) and Lot Traceability.

The Outcome

In the Food & Beverage industry, lot traceability is critical. With the stock management and stock aging capabilities in SYSPRO’s Lot Traceability module as well as its strength as a centralized inventory management system, Crown National is able to feed accurate, up-to-date reporting and inventory management information to people across the organization.

“SYSPRO does everything we want it to do and more. It’s dynamic and has the scalability required to grow with us as the business expands.”
– Arend Brink, ICT Executive, Crown Food Group.

Poised for growth

Crown National operates 22 sites countrywide. Its dry plant produces around 2100 tons of spices and seasonings a month, while its wet plant manufactures 600,000 liters of sauces and marinades monthly. The company’s annual turnover is R3 billion, and the plans are to double that in the next three to five years. This will be achieved through expansion, specifically of its factory marts that supply product direct to farmers, caterers, small businesses and the general public, and increasing its involvement on the retail front.

Arend Brink, ICT Executive of the Crown Food Group, says the roadmap going forward is exciting. “We are taking on new competitors in retail, growing into southern Africa and looking at new acquisitions for our retail brands,” he says. From a systems perspective, the focus is on optimizing Crown National’s planning and supply chain environment in both the distribution and manufacturing environments.

“Our inventory management system is fairly mature, although we’ve recently started making use of the Fixed Bin capability, and that’s adding a lot of value,” says Mark Harrison, Enterprise Architect. “Our key activities currently center on MRP and Forecasting. We have implemented MRP into Point of Sale to bolster the retail environment and adapted the MRP solution to accommodate a top-up environment rather than a forward
planning environment.”

ERP integral to the business

According to Brink the SYSPRO solution is integral to the business and critical to achieving optimal production uptime. “There was a time when it was possible to run your business manually if systems went down. That’s no longer an option – it would be chaos,” he says.

“We view our relationship with SYSPRO as a partnership. As they become part of our business, we work together on identifying opportunities for expanding the system further. It’s an ongoing journey of development and improvement.”
– Arend Brink, ICT Executive, Crown Food Group.

“SYSPRO does everything we want it to do and more. It’s dynamic and has the scalability required to grow with us as the business expands,” he says. “Another highly valuable aspect is SYSPRO’s continuing investment into its solution, with new modules and functionality being released and ongoing improvements from a stability perspective. For us, SYSPRO’s investment into its software and ability to incorporate its considerable experience into the solution are crucial. I am confident we will be gaining benefits from our SYSPRO solution for a very long time.”

The road ahead

Harrison points out that a fixed assets implementation is currently under way for a small area of the business, and plans are in place to start looking at monitoring expenditure on assets for enhanced maintenance.

“On the financials side, we’re also looking at using a SYSPRO thirdparty program called TRAILD to assist with our internal focus on digitizing processes,” he says. “TRAILD will help with Goods Received Note matching and eliminate a lot of manual processing on the finance side.”

TRAILD is a SYSPRO integrated solution for accounts payable (AP) focused on efficiency and financial control. It has been designed to extend companies’ capabilities in streamlining the AP process for enhanced operational efficiency.

Achieve business success with SYSPRO ERP

SYSPRO is a leading, global Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software provider, specializing in key manufacturing and distribution industries. SYSPRO’s ERP solution empowers customers to take the next step – whether it is expanding into new territories, adding new product lines, transforming business processes, or driving innovation.

Optimizing growth opportunities with scalable SYSPRO

Accommodate complexities and plans for expansion

Customer

Improve stock control and data accuracy

Their Business Challenge

The Solution

The Outcome

Poised for growth

ERP integral to the business

The road ahead

Achieve business success with SYSPRO ERP

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