Making the Jump: Celtic Chocolates Choose User Friendly EFACS E/8 as Their ERP Solution
Celtic Chocolates is a long standing Irish company founded in 1990. Currently Cathy Callery is leading the team as Managing Director. The company originally began producing chocolate products then recognised a gap in the market and now manufacture ‘Free From’ chocolate exclusively.
Customer Profile
Celtic Chocolates produces chocolate in a dedicated ‘Free From’ facility in County Meath, supplying Irish and UK supermarkets with free from dairy, wheat, gluten and egg chocolate bars and seasonal chocolate variations.
The Challenge
Prior to meeting with Profitsflow, traceability and audit control functionality was critical to the company’s growth. Manual processes were becoming impossible to manage accurately on a day to day basis.
The Solution
By Choosing Profitsflow and EFACS E/8 all processes are now run through one single software solution. The traceability functions within EFACS allows Celtic Chocolates to pull records instantaneously for their customers saving the company huge amounts of time and effort.
The Benefits
Everything is now on one single system. Accurate records of stock levels can be kept in real-time. With EFACS the company now has full visibility of all batches used in every product that is made. From an accounts perspective the flow from PO’s to GRN’s is much easier to manage now that it is all on one system. The costing module on EFACS now allows the company to accurately cost by individual works order. With this Celtic Chocolates now knows exactly what margins they they are achieving.
Celtic Chocolates produces chocolate in a dedicated Free From facility in County Meath, supplying Irish and UK supermarkets with free from dairy, wheat, gluten and egg chocolate bars and seasonal chocolate variations. The company originally began producing chocolate products. However, they recognised a niche in the market and started manufacturing ‘FREE FROM’ chocolate exclusively. The whole manufacturing facility is dedicated to producing gluten free products. These products can be found in the major supermarket chains here in Ireland and also the United Kingdom.
The company did not have an ERP system in place prior to implementing EFACS E/8. The company was looking to implement an ERP solution to replace their accounts package and previous IT system. The company was expanding, especially in the UK market and needed to have a more structured approach to there processes both for efficiency and regulatory reasons.
One of the main reasons why Celtic Chocolates was looking into ERP systems was due to the fact that they needed traceability and audit control functionality. This was critical to the companies growth as their current manual processes were becoming increasingly tough to manage.
The company first met Profitsflow and at annual ERP Head to Head event. This annual two-day event allows attendee’s to compare various ERP software providers with each other and find the product best suited to your requirements. After the event Celtic Chocolates made the executive decision to choose Profitsflow as their ERP provider.
It was decided that EFACS E/8 be implemented in a phased approach to make the project as manageable as possible.
Why was EFACS E/8 Chosen?
Despite there being 12 other vendors at the ERP Head To Head event Profitsflow were chosen to be the vendors that implemented Celtic Chocolates ERP solution. One of the main reasons why EFACS was chosen was due to it’s user friendly interface. Another big factor that played a role in Celtic Chocolates decision was to have access to high quality support. Financial Controller of the company Angela Walsh stated that “ The easy access to the support desk and the fact that we could have someone on-site quickly if we needed it was a key factor in choosing Profitsflow as our system providers”.
As the company did not have previous experience with ERP, implementing the system was a daunting task. A project plan was put in place which allowed the company to track key milestones along the way to give them confidence that the training was heading in the right direction. Much of the static information such as the bills of materials, parts, customers and suppliers were all imported to the system which was a huge time saver for the company.
EFACS E/8 has been a great success since Go-live. There has been a positive impact in particular with job costing and stock control which has now become much more accurate. A unique process of Celtic Chocolates business is that their customers buy on consignment. They ship to the customers warehouse and when they receive a customer PO the invoice is generated and sent via EDI on receipt of the GRN. This is all seamlessly handled with EFACS.
A word from Angela Walsh, Financial Controller at Celtic Chocolates:
“The easy access to the support desk and the fact that we could have someone on-site quickly if we needed was also a key factor in choosing Profitsflow as our system providers. We thought EFACS was very good value for money, considering the fact that it is a fully integrated system.“
