Feature Rich Business Solution Enables Quick and Timely Decision Making

Procal Dairies is a privately owned company that commenced operations in July 2003. The directors of Procal, who have approximately 80 years’ combined experience in food manufacturing and distribution, recognised that there was an opportunity for a company to enter the dairy industry and provide quality dairy products combined with exceptional levels of service to both the retail and foodservice trade.

The name Procal is an acronym for PROtein and CALcium while the phrase ‘Everything Good In Milk’ refers to the commitment that Procal has to the quality of its dairy products and level of service it provides. It is because of this commitment to these ideals that Procal Dairies has grown to become one of the largest independent dairy providers in Australia.

Challenge

“The upgrade, completed on time and on budget, was a complex project,” says Procal Office Manager, Laney Quinn. “We upgraded from SAP Business One Version 7 to 8.81, a move which streamlined some of our existing core modules and also furnished us with new functionality in the area of inventory and production.”

Quinn says the project was complicated as the company also had to upgrade its remote ordering sales system (ROSS), in order to read the new SAP system.

“In effect it was a double upgrade. We also moved from Terminal server to SQL server and had to undertake thorough testing between ROSS and SAP systems prior to go-live.”

Solution

Quinn says the three month process all went to plan with the go-live completed without incident across one weekend. “Despite our fears, it was a very smooth transition. By Monday morning everything was back to normal.”

After years using other accounting packages Quinn was pleasantly surprised at how easy the SAP Business One package was to learn and use. “It is a lot more intuitive than I expected. SAP has done a lot of work thinking about where information resides and how it is displayed to expedite the execution of business processes. Moving around the various system functions is easy and it takes very little time to bring new users up to speed.”

Procal’s invoicing is done by its delivery drivers and the information is integrated back into the SAP system. “If I had to data process the volume of invoices our drivers raise each day I would need a team of 20 to complete it. The integration between the two systems is an essential automation feature,” says Quinn.

Result

The upgraded system has delivered a range of day-to-day benefits for Quinn’s office team. The capability to append documents or links to particular customer records has proven a time-saving feature.

“With around 4000 customers, keeping credit applications in order and up-to-date was very time-consuming as we had to file them manually. Now we scan the applications and attach a soft copy link to the customer record. If one of our office staff needs to refer to a document – be it a credit application or reconciliation – it can now be viewed instantaneously. We no longer spend valuable minutes trying to find the hard copy.”

“We have introduced the inventory control and production functionality of SAP Business One to the company which we expect will provide further efficiency improvements.”

Read the full case study.