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Company Name
Raining Rose, Inc. |
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Location
Cedar Rapids, Iowa |
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Industry
Natural body care
products
and soy candles |
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Employees
57 |
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Goals
• Find Batch-Process ERP system to support growth
• Improve inventory accuracy
• Eliminate regular physical inventory counts
• Automate lot tracking |
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Solutions
• BatchMaster Enterprise ERP
• and Accpac® financial accounting software |
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Results
• Improved inventory accuracy
• Eliminated use of spreadsheets
• Confidence in lot tracking and recall capability
• Immediate COGS information
• Reduced the frequency of physical inventory counts |
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| "We chose BatchMaster because it was designed
for process manufacturing, and the best fit for our inventory management requirements." |
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| "Our customer was very impressed with our ability to handle a potential recall immediately and accurately." |
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| "We're light years ahead of where we were before BatchMaster." |
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| BatchMaster Helps Provide a Rosier Future |
| Raining Rose, Inc., maker of natural body care products and soy candles, was founded in 1996 as a family hobby in a basement kitchen. Today, the company is a growing corporation offering a high quality, turn-key manufacturing environment for custom formulas and private label brands, from an 18,200 square foot building in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Since 2005, Raining Rose has been relying on BatchMaster to help manage and improve inventory accuracy. |
| The company's founders created pure formulas of the highest quality ingredients. The current owners purchased Raining Rose in January 2003, and have focused on continuing to deliver these high quality products based on original family recipes, as well as a variety of new creations. These goals required a fast-track campaign to expand the company. Since the acquisition, Raining Rose has more than tripled its staff and has carved a unique niche in the natural body care industry. Raining Rose can manufacture and fill almost any order, but has particular expertise in lip and body balms, sunscreen, lotion, hand sanitizer, and soy candles. |
| Rapid Growth |
| Raining Rose has been recognized four years in a row by Inc. Magazine as one of the fastest growing companies in America, and operates an FDA-registered and inspected facility. Products are distributed throughout the United States under private label, as advertising specialty items, and with the Raining Rose brand. |
| In 2004, Raining Rose faced some serious challenges as a consequence of its rapid growth. As Judy Lubben, controller, explained:
“Poor inventory accuracy was affecting customer service. We used Peachtree for accounting, and spreadsheets for managing inventory and production. As the product line grew, it became more and more difficult to keep the inventory records accurate. We really didn't have a good handle on our inventory, and we never had any confidence in the numbers until we conducted a physical inventory count at the end of each month. We really needed to know exactly what we had in inventory all the time, not just at the end of the month.” |
| Search for a New System |
| Raining Rose started looking for a new software solution, and found BatchMaster as a result of a Google search. “We found a lot of manufacturing software packages, but very few addressed the needs of process manufacturing,” said Lubben.
The Raining Rose evaluation team consisted of Lubben and the production manager. |
| “We chose BatchMaster because it was designed for process manufacturing, and was the best fit for our inventory management requirements,” said Lubben. “We are a FDA-regulated company, so it was essential that the prospective software solution supported FDA regulations, especially regarding lot tracking. We presented the BatchMaster solution to the company's owners, and finally we performed due diligence by talking with several BatchMaster customers.”
Raining Rose started their implementation during November 2004, and went live in March 2005.
“We followed BatchMaster's implementation methodology. We met regularly with our implementation consultants who conducted all the training and guided us through the process. They answered all of our questions, and if they didn't know the answer immediately, they always found the answer,” said Lubben. |
| The immediate benefit to Raining Rose was the vast improvement in inventory accuracy.
“Our inventory data is far more accurate now that we have stopped using spreadsheets,” said Lubben. “We now have confidence in our inventory records, and we only do a physical inventory quarterly instead of monthly. Before BatchMaster all of our production batches were also recorded on spreadsheets. Now BatchMaster helps us calculate optimum production batch sizes.” |
| Besides real-time inventory information, Raining Rose now benefits from knowing the Cost Of Goods Sold (COGS) immediately, as soon as an order leaves the factory. |
| Regulatory Compliance |
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As an FDA-regulated company, Raining Rose must demonstrate its ability to track its products bi-directionally, from the supplier to the customer and from the customer back to the supplier. With many companies today increasingly worried about product safety, the ability to perform a recall quickly and effectively is essential. “Before BatchMaster, our lot tracking was a manually intensive process,” said Lubben. “Now the system automatically tracks our lots from raw material through production and finally to the customer. I hope we never have to recall any of our products, but with BatchMaster I am confident that we can perform a recall quickly and accurately.”
Some customers are asking their suppliers to perform mock recalls as a condition of doing business. Lubben described just such an occurrence: |
| “We were working with a new private-label customer, and they wanted to be sure that we could handle a recall. With BatchMaster's lot tracking we were able to identify a specific lot number, and trace that production batch into finished goods and every sales order and bulk shipment containing that lot. The customer was very impressed with our ability to handle a potential recall immediately and accurately.” |
| Eliminating Physical Inventory Counts |
| Conducting monthly physical inventory counts was both time-consuming and disruptive to the business. Raining Rose is looking to further improve inventory accuracy and eliminate the need for regular physical inventory counts with the introduction of BatchMaster Mobile™, a wireless data collection system: |
| “We have recently implemented BatchMaster Mobile,” said Lubben. “This gives us the capability to track a product all the way through from raw material to the final customer. It will also help us further improve inventory accuracy by eliminating keying errors. We're light years ahead of where we were before BatchMaster, but we can always get better. I'm hoping this will also facilitate us moving to a semi-annual inventory count, or even annual.”
Raining Rose is getting ready to upgrade, and looking forward to taking advantage of the new capabilities in BatchMaster's latest version: |
| “We are particularly interested in the Dashboards for management information,” said Lubben. “This will give more people in the company access to the information available in BatchMaster. The drill-down capability looks great. We will be able to look at the summary information, see if we have a problem, and then drill-down to the detail and see the root cause.” |
| All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective companies. |
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