Traditional Cheese Company

Traditional Cheese at a glance:

• Dairy products business swaps unsuitable ERP for industry-specific platform
• Company gains unprecedented insight into margins and costs
• Improved order management and sales fulfilment fosters better customer relationships
• Enhanced data provides a platform for sales opportunities and business growth.

Limited features in ERP hold back business

For many businesses, the trigger to upgrade their ERP software is often when the vendor stops supporting the current system. For Traditional Cheese Company (TCC), that was only part of the story. The privately owned Irish business was founded in 1985 to promote and distribute Irish and continental cheese. To help meet traceability requirements under food industry regulations, it had installed an IT system in 2012. However, that was an accountancy package with a warehousing module add-on, and its features were limited.

Since that system came into use, TCC had been growing its sales into the retail sector, and sometimes it needed to provide large chains with every item specifically labelled for their stores. In other cases, the team needed to divide large wheels of cheese into smaller portions. This brought extra complexity to the work, TCC director Julian Carr explains.

We would have to create a new item code that was in no way linked to the ‘mother product’, so pricing it was a very manual process. For example, our production operatives were continually having to create new codes for a French Brie. Trying to maintain the costs on those products was messy, and the finance team couldn’t track labour or time,

Stock visibility issues hinder decision making

With as many as 700 SKUs, TCC had no easy way to track stock anomalies and find consistent information easily in one place. TCC relied on the industry experience of the sales and marketing teams, but didn’t have the data to support its decisions. Tracking margins was difficult, which hindered management from seeing potential sales opportunities for products that were performing well. Then by 2023, the original supplier said the system would no longer get upgrades. The time had come for a new ERP system that would meet TCC’s distribution and production needs into the future.

Upgrading to an ERP built for the food sector

Julian started conversations with several potential ERP suppliers. Among them was ProStrategy, which he asked to present to the TCC board. The ProStrategy team impressed everyone with their ability to understand TCC’s specific challenges and answer questions in detail. After winning the bid, ProStrategy recommended Aptean Food & Beverage (F&B) ERP, which is built on Microsoft Dynamics Business Central. This had all the modules and features that TCC needed for its daily operations.

ProStrategy’s close management of the project meant it met all deadlines with minimal disruption to regular business operations and none of the stress that can come with major transformation programmes.

The go-live went amazing, we were delighted with that. There were no real hiccups. I had gone through one with the old system, coming in at 4am and leaving at 11 at night for 2 weeks. This time, the go-live just really flowed well.

Meeting implementation challenges head on

The new platform provides automated purchase orders, sales orders, and logistics seamlessly, compared to how TCC’s older system could only handle basic transactions that needed manual and laborious processes for special cases like drop shipments.

The project had its challenges, however. Moving from spreadsheet-based work involving lots of manual input to a more digitised process was a significant change to how TCC’s warehouse operatives and all its admin staff worked. “They were not used to digital workflows and we had to train a lot to implement the new features which replaced outdated cumbersome processes. All the staff were much happier once they picked up on how to use Business Central compared to their old ways,” Julian adds.

One of the keys to the success of the project was TCC’s decision to hire a fulltime business systems analyst, Ajinkya Goghare, who was able to troubleshoot day-to-day challenges for colleagues without needing to escalate to the service provider or raise a ticket with the vendor. A mechanical engineer by training, Ajinkya quickly became familiar with the system, and he also provides valuable guidance and support to his colleagues on how to get the best out of its features. “We wouldn’t have got the benefits if not for Ajinkya. He understands the system, which can be quite complex,” Julian explains.

Improved margin analysis and understanding costs

The system went live at the end of March 2025, and Julian believes it’s already showing its value. As well as digitising many workflows, the system provides “much clearer cost analysis on our day-to-day transactions,” he says. “So far, we are delighted with how things are going here. Our team bought into the project and worked positively with us and the team from ProStrategy which really made the project a success.”

He adds: “The data we are now seeing coming through the system from our production, purchasing, warehousing, and sales will allow us to tackle margin issues extremely well, as a huge amount of costs were buried and unattainable on our old system. The digitised processes, we strongly believe, will create efficiencies which will result in much better order management and sales fulfilment, which in turn will build better relations with current customers, and open doors we may not have had the chance to do before.”

Driving culture change and enhancing efficiency

Some of the benefits are still emerging because the project is so recent. Ultimately, Julian believes the new ERP will drive a culture change in the business, with proper processes for gathering accurate data that will ultimately lead to better discussions and business decisions.

You get the correct data in, you can analyse the data and start analysing margins better, and deliver a better service to customer. It’s all about growth. I do believe that Business Central is an amazing tool that will help us grow, get lean and get efficiency. We wouldn’t be able to do that without it.

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