How Surlean Foods tackled food safety in real-time using Cognos Analytics 11
The Challenge
Generating USDA compliant reporting real-time by anyone in the organisation at any point during the week. The existing process utilized three disjointed reports that only 3 highly skilled employees in the company were able to run.
The Solution
The solution addresses two business critical needs. The first is a real-time exact replication
of the database to the cloud, which can serve as an automatic switch-over disaster recover solution. The second is converting that replica into a Business Intelligence Data Warehouse near-real time. This allows disaster recovery backed ad-hoc reporting 7 days a week to meet USDA reporting requirements.
The Benefit
Surlean can now track all operations, minuteby-minute. This is driving improvements in business processes that will move the company towards even more efficiency and profitability while remaining in regulatory compliance.
About Surlean Foods
Surlean Foods is a custom food manufacturer, providing America’s leading restaurant chains with proteins, soups, sauces, and more since 1979. Surlean Foods two locations in San Antonio and Dallas, TX employ over 225 individuals. Continuing to improve operations, R&D and customer service, Surlean Foods recently updated its production optimization process to now using the Red Zone system. In 2016 Surlean Foods spent $8 million to upgrade the Dallas location to include a customer innovation center. Surlean Foods launched a new ERP system on October 1, 2018 and has seen an increase in business intelligence.
“QueBIT worked with the Surlean Foods team to create a robust recall system with traceability from beginning to end. Their project planning, communication, and responsiveness to our needs made them very easy to work with.”
- Katie McClain, V.P. of Technical Services & Continuous Improvement
The Challenge
Food safety presents significant operational, financial, and reputational risk for producers, where the ability to quickly trace the source, processing, and distribution of products is critical. With frequent recalls and the perishable nature of food products, organizations must respond rapidly to incidents to prevent contaminated goods from reaching consumers. The challenge extends beyond identifying affected lots to accounting for all related inputs and outputs across the production process, where speed, accuracy, and transparency can be the difference between manageable remediation and severe business impact.
Delivering the Solution
Surlean Foods, a subsidiary of Leonard Holding Company, faced challenges managing and reporting on the location and value of raw materials and finished goods across its operations. The company sought to modernize by replacing fragmented inventory, accounting, and legacy systems with a unified ERP and analytics solution. Surlean partnered with Deacom and QueBIT to implement a new ERP platform and an integrated Cognos Analytics environment, enabling real-time reporting and improving visibility across purchasing, production, sales, and inventory data.
Benefits/Results
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