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Vietnamese JR Watkins is a US-based home care, body care, and gourmet food products manufacturer. Throughout most of its 150-year history, JR Watkins relied on direct sales. The company underwent a big change 10 years ago and started working with retailers and wholesalers.
In order to be able to reliably deliver its products to these new customers, who are much larger and more demanding than individual buyers, the company needed a new system that is capable of managing the entire operations, from procurement to manufacturing and distribution. JR Watkins first went for Infor M3, and later switched to Infor CloudSuite, a more modern cloud-based Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system.
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Benefits of Cloud ERP for F&B manufacturers
By moving to the cloud, the company is getting plenty of new tools for different business processes. For instance, with the embedded Infor BI application, they have access to demand planner and scheduler, and product tracker.
Another great benefit of switching to cloud ERP is increased cyber security. In contrast to the popular beliefs, keeping data in the cloud could actually be more secure than keeping it in your own system (find out why). JR Watkins’s data is now protected by Infor’s and Amazon’s cyber security experts. And so it is one fewer thing that the company has to worry about.
Read more: How Amazon’s cloud infrastructure benefits ERP software
One particular aspect that JR Watkins paid very close attention to, from the very beginning of the project, is TCO (total cost of ownership) calculation. They deep dived into what would cost them to run the system – hardware, people, and software. And the company believes that they are going to save half a million dollars over the first 5 years.
Moving to the cloud also helps JR Watkins go mod free - no customisation required - even though, initially, they had 20 modifications in their system, 4 of which are critical to their operations.
When the company started working with its ERP vendor, Infor, everyone was thinking of a 9 to 12-month project. But the company later aimed for a 4-month timeframe in order to beat the business season. Eventually, the project was finished in 3 months.
Read more: Why there are gaps between Business Cases and ERP Project Outcomes
“We've got a great future when it comes to systems and supporting the processes that we have,” says JR Watkins IT director Scott Iverson in a recent interview. You can watch the full interview in the video below.
Or you can request a free demo to see which ERP system is the best fit for your enterprise.
