Burts Potato Chips, which serves a number of farm shops, cafes and deli’s as well as high street retailers including Sainsbury’s and Waitrose, is seeing huge efficiency savings thanks to the implementation of its new ERP solution, Access SupplyChain and Access SelectPay.
Burts Potato Chips, which serves a number of farm shops, cafes and deli’s as well as high street retailers including Sainsbury’s and Waitrose, is seeing huge efficiency savings thanks to the implementation of its new ERP solution, Access SupplyChain and Access SelectPay. With aspirations to grow the business to £20m over the next three years, the 85-strong Devon-based company needed an integrated system to provide tighter controls over its financial, production processing and stock control.
“Access SupplyChain is helping us to scrutinise every area of our business. It’s already saved us thousands of pounds through greater efficiency and faster access to information,” said Mike Cosby, Finance Director for Burts Potato Chips, whose previous Sage Line 200 system could not provide the level of analysis and management reporting required.
Burts is benefiting from significant time and cost savings and has considerably reduced manual processing. “We no longer carry out monthly stock takes as inventory is reconciled in real-time saving us around £12,000 a year,” said Mike. Burts is now conducting a perpetual inventory with barcoding improving accuracy and speed.
“With Access SupplyChain we can view the stock position on the system in real-time and know it’s 99% correct. This has given a real boost to our customer service as we have full confidence in the accuracy of the information we’re providing.”
The solution is playing an important role in managing wastage too. “Access SupplyChain gives us instant visibility of production costing, enabling us to analyse and reduce product wastage. Not only does this have a financial benefit, it also has a positive environmental impact,” said Mike.
Burts Potato Chips is able to readily carry out variance analysis, from purchase price to production costs, as well as retrospective stock valuation and comprehensive sales and product analysis – all of which was previously very cumbersome. Reporting is faster with easy access to information too. Mike commented, “We can easily create up-to-the-minute production reports allowing us to analyse activity in an instant; we also have full warehouse location visibility which we didn’t have before.”
Burts Potato Chips started its quest for the perfect British potato chip 15 years ago with one single fryer and bags of enthusiasm. From its home in Devon, Burts has built a reputation for quality by carefully hand cooking crisps in small batches using only the finest natural ingredients. The company has been rewarded with numerous awards from Winner of the Food Manufacturing Excellence Awards to Taste of the West Gold 2012.
“With Access SupplyChain we’ve future-proofed the business and could easily double or treble in size. We’re looking to grow to over £20m over the next two to three years in order to maximise production capacity; we’re confident that Access will easily support us every step of the way,” concluded Mike.
Source: The Access Group
