AT A GLANCE
- COMPANY: Wallbridge Company Limited
- ESTABLISHED: 1999
- LOCATION: Bagenalstown, Co. Carlow
- FOOD SECTOR: Ingredients Supplier
- MARKET: Ireland, UK
- PRODUCTS: Pastry, Seasonings, Sauces, Crumbs & Coatings
- NO. OF EMPLOYEES: 7
OVERVIEW
Wallbridge built a superb reputation for providing both supplies and solutions to Irish and UK food companies, backed by strong, service-led relationships with long-standing customers. Their commitment to quality helped ensure the company’s steady growth, but their highly manual processes and legacy systems could not keep pace.
A complete, modern, automated digital solution was needed to enable the stock management, financial control and business intelligence required to optimise their operations and ensure continued growth. The ability to see stock levels in real time, analyse customer data to forecast future needs, and gain full visibility and traceability across their operations would be transformative for Wallbridge.
WALLBRIDGE GLOBALLY SOURCE SPECIALITY FOOD INGREDIENTS FOR SUPPLY ACROSS IRELAND AND THE UK
INTRODUCTION
A COMMITMENT TO QUALITY IN EVERY INGREDIENT
Founded in 1999 to source and supply distinct, high-quality ingredients for the food processing industry, Wallbridge today supports a broad range of innovative food companies with superior ingredients and their extensive experience in food production and new product development. The family-owned business is headquartered in Bagenalstown, Co. Carlow, where the well-established team specialise in the procurement, warehousing and delivery of seasonings, spices, bases, crumbs, pastries and much more to clients as they need them.
Quality and relationship sit at the heart of Wallbridge’s operations, and are evident in the standard of ingredients they supply as well as the strong partnerships they’ve built with customers and suppliers over the years. In addition to sourcing both standard and custom ingredients, the Wallbridge team apply their expertise in product development and production efficiency to work directly with clients to develop and perfect new offerings.
THE CHALLENGE
GROWING TO MEET DEMAND
Wallbridge was expanding consistently year over year, supporting a broad range of food manufacturers and producers with bespoke and generic products. Their manual internal systems and processes had grown organically along with the business, and by 2017 had become cumbersome, time-consuming and inefficient. Complex excel spreadsheets made quick lookups impossible and reporting a chore, and the manual process of checking products in and out of the warehouse was slow and vulnerable to human error.
To continue scaling and providing top-quality service and ingredients for their customers, Wallbridge needed a modern, complete solution for managing real-time data, stock information, pricing, accounting and reporting. Changes in EU traceability directives, along with uncertainty around customs challenges post-Brexit, meant that having full visibility and control of operations had become essential.
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WALLBRIDGE DELIVER FOR A RANGE OF CLIENTS
Food Service
Food Industry
Bespoke Solutions
Consultancy & Advice
THE SOLUTION
REAL-TIME DATA VISIBILITY, TRACING AND REPORTING
Wallbridge looked for a partner who understood the unique challenges of the food industry, as they did, and who could provide a complete ERP solution for full stock management, traceability and electronic data capture and analysis. For a system to benefit operations at Wallbridge, it needed to provide easy, trusted visibility of all stock, orders and sales, and give the team the ability to view and analyse all information in real time and in multiple formats.
In November 2017, DIOMAC began working with Wallbridge to implement the DIOMAC PLUS solution, with electronic scanning, automated data capture, full end-to-end traceability, stock management and financial reporting. The volume of ingredients and variability in stock and customer codes required additional configuration, which the teams worked together to achieve. In February 2018, Wallbridge went live with their new ERP and immediately took notice of the transformation.
DIOMAC DELIVERED
A centralised system to manage the business of Procurement, Sales, Warehousing and Reporting
- A rich single source of true information relating to customers, suppliers and products, as well as a detailed history of sales and purchases to support future planning
- Business analytics tool for enhanced data visualisation, drill-down and mining
- Dynamically produced management accounts with summary and detailed views
- Customisation and configuration to scan all supplier barcode formats
- Custom label printing for incoming unlabelled pallets
- Date-driven customer pricing including promotional pricing
- Improved controls with precise user access permissions
- Sales/customer and purchase/supplier management processes
- Timely and accurate profit visibility, with gross profit reports by customer and product
- Live stock information, with availability, on order in and out, instant valuation
- Fast, accurate mobile handheld scanning for intake, dispatch, returns, location management and stock-taking
- End-to-end traceability with digital tracing maps and reports
- Product recall process and mass balance reconciliation
- Paperless system with capability to attach all electronic document forms, including supplier invoices, product specifications and more
- Streamlined accounting processes including full landed cost accounting for purchases
“To put my feelings about DIOMAC succinctly: I wish we had done it sooner.”
Des McDonough, Owner
IMMEDIATE BENEFITS
TIME SAVINGS, REVENUE GAINS
Soon after implementing DIOMAC, Wallbridge experienced significant time savings with stock takes, reporting and accounting, as well as increased confidence in their data accuracy and planning. In the five years since go-live, Wallbridge have significantly increased their sales, productivity and overall performance with less waste and tighter financial control.
“It’s like night and day,” says James Grennan, Operations Manager at Wallbridge. “DIOMAC is an integral part of the business and has made a big difference.”
WALLBRIDGE’S GAINS
Key benefits gained by Wallbridge after partnering with DIOMAC
- 100% improvement in team productivity
- Complete visibility of full landed costs and FX exposure across all products
- Full product trace in minutes versus several hours
- Easy setup of customer pricing, including customer promo periods in advance
- Improved ability to forecast customer needs and coordinate lead times
- A significant 75% reduction in time spent checking stock every month
- Digital tracing map of all products enables fast, easy traceability
- BRC audits completed in 20% of the previous time
- Range of financial reports at the click of a button, including management accounts, sales, purchases, inventory, quality, traceability, pricing and more
LASTING RESULTS
THE WAY FORWARD FOR WALLBRIDGE
Recent years have brought a series of unforeseen challenges, from Brexit to the pandemic to the Suez Canal disruption, and Wallbridge credit DIOMAC for helping them seamlessly navigate each event. Like all food businesses post-Covid, Wallbridge faced an unprecedented period of inflation which saw ingredient and transportation prices spiral, requiring constant monitoring of supplier and customer pricing to keep gross margins in check.
Through it all, the depth of data analysis and reporting enabled the team to adapt to changes like dramatically longer lead times and shipping delays, changes in customs requirements, pricing adjustments and more. The intelligence they had gathered over the years allowed Wallbridge to advise customers on ordering patterns in good time, as external factors put normal practices at risk.
Monthly stock takes that previously took two days are now completed before lunch. During a recent BRC audit, the auditor requested a full traceability report for one of Wallbridge’s largest products and prepared to return in four hours to collect it. Instead, James opened the DIOMAC digital tracing map and ran the report in minutes while the auditor waited.
“She said it was the fastest traceability she had ever seen,” James recalls. “When an auditor sees the speed and that you’re clearly showing on the screen the supplier, the quantity received, names of all the customers and what they received – and if you wanted any documentation from that, it’s there at the click of a button – the auditor is quite happy.”
“Before DIOMAC I was able to dig out most of the information that I wanted, but it wasn’t live information,” explains Des. “Now the fact that I can look in one place in the Cube and see the information by category, by product and so on, and there I can see every individual product broken down by supplier, volume, date and see the full landed costs beside it – that’s changed everything.”
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DIOMAC empowers you to grow your business with a fully connected team that achieves superior performance levels with instant product traceability and total visibility of operational performance and profitability.
WALLBRIDGE CASE STUDY PDF
Find out how Wallbridge optimised their business performance by investing in DIOMAC ERP.
