About 60 miles west of Columbus, Ohio, situated along the banks of the Muskingum River, lies the picturesque town of Zanesville, population 25,000. Rich with history, Zanesville was a notorious hub for bootlegging activity during the Prohibition Era.
These days, the town is known for a far tamer vice—it’s home to the New Bloomer Candy Company. The company was founded in 1879 and has been delighting children and adults of all ages with their signature chocolates and candies ever since.
The New Bloomer Candy Company
New Bloomer sells over 6,000 types of products. Chocolate products, such as chocolate cremes and peanut clusters, are manufactured on site, while bulk candies, such as caramel cremes and orange and cherry slices, are imported from various suppliers and repackaged with the New Bloomer brand. The company distributes all products via their own trucking fleet to customers big and small across Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Indiana.
An organization steeped in tradition, New Bloomer makes their chocolate using family recipes that, until recently, were passed down solely by word of mouth. Their 32 employees consider each other family—many have deep roots in the area and fondly recall growing up with the company’s distinct red and green gift baskets on their kitchen tables during the holidays. 
Chocolates manufactured in New Bloomer's facility
A few years ago, however, New Bloomer realized there was one area of operations in need of significant modernization: their legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.
A Previous System With Significant Weaknesses
As a small, seasonal business, New Bloomer’s daily operations vary greatly depending on the time of year. From January to September, bagged candies are the most popular, and account for approximately 60 percent of sales, while chocolate products account for 40 percent. In the last quarter of the year, however, chocolates take over, comprising 70 percent of all business during the holiday season.
The company’s biggest daily challenge is ensuring there is enough product on hand to fill customer orders. Every order placed has a certain lead time, which can vary from 24 hours up to several weeks or even months, depending on the type of product, quantity and where it needs to be shipped.
In order to meet this challenge, the company must carefully plan and allocate their resources so they know what to buy, how much to buy and when to buy it. Much of this responsibility falls upon the shoulders of Controller Mike Montgomery, who joined the company in 2010, shortly after it was sold to new owners.
Montgomery, who speaks with a deep drawl and the measured calmness of a man used to running the show, has nearly four decades of foodservice experience. Upon arriving at New Bloomer, it didn’t take him long to determine that the company’s ERP system was inadequate and needed to be replaced.
“They had a homegrown system that the previous owners had built,” he says. “It could churn out invoices and sales reports, but it wasn’t an ERP system. It didn’t help you plan and it didn’t do a good job on lot controls—things that are really important for a food manufacturer. It involved a lot of Excel and flat files, and it was a big weakness in terms of how the company was run.”
Another big issue was the lack of employee knowledge on how to use the system. “At the time, there were about 50 employees, and only four of them were ‘super users’ who knew how to use it—the rest only knew how to do their individual job,” Montgomery recalls. “The attitude was, ‘Don’t worry about it, if you need something in the system, come to me and I’ll take care of it.’”
A Search for a New and Improved ERP Solution
New Bloomer began the search for a new ERP system in the spring of 2010, with several “must-have” features in mind. “Since we’re in the food manufacturing business, lot control was one of the biggest things we needed,” Montgomery says. “If we ever have a bad product, or if a supplier has a bad product that’s recalled, we need a way to be able to find out where it is quickly. The previous system didn’t have this capability, so that’s something we knew we had to have.”
New Bloomer initially evaluated 50 ERP systems, eventually narrowing the decision down to three. On December 31st, 2010, the company made the decision to purchase Solarsoft Tropos ERP. (Solarsoft was acquired by Epicor in 2012, and the system has since been rebranded as Epicor Tropos.)
Montgomery says a big part of the company’s decision to go with Epicor Tropos was that it was being used by other companies in food service, which made it an attractive option. This was so important, in fact, that New Bloomer actually traveled to Scotland to visit food service companies that were using the system to get a better sense of their experience with the software.
A Carefully Planned and Executed Implementation
An Epicor project manager arrived at New Bloomer in February 2011 to oversee implementation of Epicor Tropos, which was installed on-premise. This was no small undertaking: data from the old system had to be transferred into the new system, sometimes by hand, and screens had to be created for common everyday processes the company needed to oversee.
Individual user accounts also had to be established so each employee had access only to the specific information needed for their job. “We needed to make sure that an employee wouldn’t log in and see 56,000 items to select from if they only needed to look at 5,000,” Montgomery explains. “We didn’t want to start out by making it so people couldn’t find anything because the system was too big and cumbersome to use.”
To train staff on Epicor Tropos, different work teams were created, and employees were taught how to use the areas of the system required to perform their jobs. Throughout the implementation process, Montgomery was adamant that all employees take ownership of using the system. “I wanted all users to be involved, familiar with it and working well together,” he says. “When we went live that September, everyone had their sleeves rolled up and was ready to rock.”
Greater Visibility Improves Communication and Planning
One of the biggest immediate benefits New Bloomer saw after implementing Epicor Tropos was a significant improvement in employee communication as a result of greater access to essential information. New Bloomer has two separate locations in Zanesville: imported bulk candies are repackaged and labeled in one building, while chocolate products are manufactured at another site, five miles away. In the past, communication between these two facilities was cumbersome and inefficient.
“When I first came here, the facility downtown, where they make the chocolate, didn’t have any computers—all communication was done via phone,” explains Montgomery. “They had no access to be able to look anything up, so if they needed something like boxes, they would have to call the warehouse to find out how many they had on hand.”
With the new system, all information, from work orders to inventory levels, is stored in one place, and everything is updated in real time. “There are no more questions,” Montgomery says. “Everyone has a screen that tells them the information they need. If someone asks me a question they can find out themselves, I say, ‘Go on the system and figure it out.’ We’re trying to make all of our users as self-sufficient as possible. We didn’t have that ability with the old system.” 
The main dashboard in Epicor Tropos
Epicor Tropos also features a manufacturing resource planning (MRP) screen that helps staff determine when to order more materials for certain products. As soon as work orders are placed, the system is updated so all employees have an accurate portrayal of processes, transactions and inventory levels. The company’s manufacturing process leaders can then view these orders to determine if the company has enough product on hand to fill them, or if more needs to be made or ordered.
Epicor Tropos' Forecast Management screen
Once a purchase order is created and sent out, the MRP screen is updated to show how much of a particular product is on hand and how much has been ordered to come in. The system then compares this with the lead time of the work order so employees can determine when they’ll have enough inventory to fill the order, and if this date falls within the timeframe requested by the customer.
Lot Control and Expiry Reports Save Thousands of Dollars
Epicor Tropos is also helping New Bloomer grow their operations. The company is currently working with a third party consultant in order to get their facilities certified by the Warehouse Education and Resource Council (WERC), a qualification that will help them land bigger clients, such as large drugstore chains.
One of the areas WERC auditors evaluate is lot control, which assesses a company’s ability to effectively handle a product recall if New Bloomer receives a bad batch of chocolate, for example. To this end, Epicor Tropos has screens that allow employees to track all items, so if a batch must be recalled, they can figure out exactly which orders have been made with that batch and where they are—in inventory, in transit, already stocked on shelves, etc.
The system also informs employees when products have, or are about to, expire, which is a critical feature for a foodservice operation like New Bloomer. “Different chocolates and candies have different shelf lives,” Montgomery says. “Some items can have a shelf life of six months, some a year or more. At some point, that product is going to expire, and we need to know when this is.”
In the past, the company lacked this knowledge, which cost them a significant amount of money. “When I first came here, there were racks and racks of outdated products,” Montgomery says. He estimates that these expired products cost the company anywhere from $20,000-$40,000 per year.
Now, New Bloomer has set up Epicor Tropos to periodically deliver two sets of reports: one for items that have already expired, and one for items that are about to expire. “When we look at these reports, we’re able to say, ‘Hey, we’ve got these five items that are going to expire in the next two months, we’ve got to get them out of here, we need to get them sold so we don’t lose money,’” Montgomery says.
As a result, New Bloomer has significantly reduced the amount of inventory on hand in their warehouse, which translates into far less expired products.“Our inventory at the end of 2011 was $1.6 million, and at the end of 2012 was $1.2 million—most of that is because of [Epicor Tropos], Montgomery says. “The system helps us control our inventory better so we’re not bringing in truckloads of product we don’t need. We’re doing a much better job there.”
Better Inventory Management Improves Customer Relations
Improved inventory control has also led New Bloomer to develop better relationships with their customers, which is key for the business to succeed. “We’re in the business of customer service,” Montgomery says. “If our customers aren’t happy, we’re not going to have any business at all, so we try to work with them to handle each particular order in the best way we can. When we ship orders, we want to be able to ship them complete, or as close to complete as possible.”
With Epicor Tropos, automatic reports reveal how much of a certain product a customer has ordered and how much of this order has already been picked so employees can see if there are any shortages. If the company doesn’t have enough product on hand, New Bloomer employees can use the system to see if they can substitute another product in its place.
“There are a lot of cases where we do this, where we’re able to still make a sale by subbing something else out,” Montgomery says. “There are all kinds of benefits in the system that give our people the knowledge to control their inventory. The buyer is ready to react, the work order crew is ready to react and we’re able to satisfy our customers better.”
Employees are also able to provide customers with details about their order without a delay. “Now our staff knows which screens to go to, so they can answer any questions customers have and look up orders and provide them with any information they need, such as where their order is in production,” Montgomery explains. “The other system did not have that capability at all. We’d say, ‘We’ll have to call you back.’”
Epicor Tropos' Production Scheduling Screen
Integration With Routing System Saves Time and Money
New Bloomer uses a third party routing package to organize all of the orders that are transported and delivered via their trucking fleet. Efficient routing is an essential part of company operations—sending out orders costs money, so the more complete an order is, the more cost efficient it is to transport. “If we’re going to ship something to a certain location, we want that order to be as large as it can be,” Montgomery says.
Product deliveries must also be carefully coordinated with the workers New Bloomer hires to stock their merchandise in the stores of the customers they deliver to. “If we’re late or don’t make a delivery, then that product is sitting in the back room until the next week,” Montgomery says. “It’s a real challenge to put that all together and make sure that it happens according to plan.”
Epicor Tropos integrates with the routing package so all orders set to be delivered are automatically populated in third party system. This allows employees to determine where orders needs to be transported to, what routes they should travel, where the stops on each route should be located and what time slots orders need to be delivered within.
Epicor Tropos' Transport Manager screen
The integration between the two systems has led to significant efficiency improvements. “When I started here, we had 15 trucking routes per week, and now we’re down to eight,” Montgomery says. New Bloomer was also able to consolidate route stops, which saved over 100,000 miles traveled in the first year and a half since Epicor Tropos was implemented and greatly reduced transport time and gas money.
Employee Satisfaction Improves Company Culture
While it’s clear that Epicor Tropos has been extremely effective in improving virtually all areas of New Bloomer’s operations, Montgomery is most excited about the effect of the software on the company’s employees. “The biggest improvement has been users buying into the system,” Montgomery explains. “They all enjoy using the system—they’re all in there like a bunch of giddy, happy people when they discover new shortcuts or capabilities they didn’t know the system had.”
As a result, New Bloomer’s dedicated staff has a renewed sense of pride in their work, which helps strengthen the company’s reputation as a tight-knit, hard-working group devoted to providing the utmost in quality to their customers.
“Now these people own their jobs because they know where the information is and they can look it up themselves,” Montgomery says. “We’ve changed the culture here, just with this new ERP system, because now people have more knowledge than they’ve ever had.”