Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery - September 2008 - (Page 20)

2008 W ho l e s a l e Ba k e r o f t h e Y e a r Mike Aufiero, chief financial officer, and Andy Artzer, chief information officer, have worked together to leverage synergies and maximize efficiencies for Charter Baking. All For One B usinesses are like people. No matter how common they seem, every one has its own personality that makes it unique. In 2005, Charter Baking, a portfolio company of New York-based Charterhouse Group, acquired four entrepreneurial baking companies that had a lot in common. In 2005, the company bought Vermont Bread Co. of Brattleboro, Vt., and Rudi’s Organic Bakery of Boulder, Colo., which is now home to Charter Baking. A year later, the company purchased Superior Bakery of North Grosvenordale, Conn., and Adams Baking of Milford, N.J. All produced natural products, but in its own special way. Since joining Charter Baking as chief information officer, Andy Artzer’s biggest challenge has been getting the four pieces to work together and leverage the synergies among them. That meant setting up an information system and, specifically, a handheld route tracking system last year for more than 100 direct-store-delivery (DSD) routes along the East Coast and 18 routes out of its sales operations in Boulder, Colo. Prior to Charter Baking’s purchase, the DSD sales operations in Brattleboro, North Grosvenordale and Milford each had separate sales systems and own accounting structures. For the most part, orders, sales tracking and route settlement were done on paper, although Milford had a first-generation handheld system. Moving them to the Information Age was a quantum leap that transformed the way they approached their businesses. Rolling out the handheld system, for instance, has improved speed to market, saved hours of data entry, resulted in shorter billing cycles, reduced stale rates and provided better forecasting of sales, Artzer says. “Visibility is the No. 1 advantage,” he notes. “We can see the number of times we frequent the customer and the quantity of what we are selling. Another benefit is return control and understanding our customers. Who needs what and how much of it? We went from being reactive to proactive.” The system also has allowed the sales department to consolidate routes and enhance distribution efficiencies by combining The Baker, Vermont Bread, Matthew’s All Natural and Rudi’s Organic brands on one truck throughout a DSD system that ranges from Vermont and Boston along the coast down through New York and Philadelphia. It also helped the sales department reduce the number of stops per route and allows sales representatives to spend more time providing customer service, says Tom Nash, vice president of sales. In some cases, information sharing has allowed the company to add routes as the business grows. Most of all, Nash notes, it took the guesswork out of managing sales. Sales, production and distribution are not the only areas where IT’s omnipresence has been felt. In accounting and finance, Mike Aufiero, chief financial officer, has been restructuring that part of the business over the last year. The enhanced information system and process improvements have allowed his department to improve financial visibility, simplify and standardize profit-and-loss reports, as well as provide timely, accurate data of sales by brand, by route, by customer and by store. It also gave the ability to understand the business at multiple levels and coordinate plant production and distribution. Today, Aufiero says, Charter Baking is divided into freeze-thaw and DSD businesses. A Northeast controller monitors that region. A new corporate controller also watches over the Western region. In 2008, productivity efforts will result in combining the Milford operation into the North Grosvenordale one. Out East, accounting for the DSD system has been centralized in Long Island, N.Y. With 350 to 375 employees, depending on the season, Charter Baking has been standardizing payrolls, consolidating benefits and finding ways to identify and increase the skill sets of its workforce, says Connie Deitsch, director of human resources. Taking the best of what small, entrepreneurial companies have to offer and combining it with the best practices can be a delicate process. Deitsch estimates that the restructuring process is nearly complete. “We’ve all come from bigger organizations,” she notes. “This [company] is small to us, but to companies we consolidated, we’re huge now. It’s really important that our management team out in the field has the ability to make decisions but with the expectations around what decisions can be made and what needs to be rolled up.” As the saying goes, all for one and one for all. SF&WB 20 Photo by Marta Garcia Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery - SEPTEMBER 2008

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery - September 2008

Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery - September 2008 Contents Editor’s Note For Goodness Sakes Better Than the Rest Unconventional Thinking Easy Does It New Products In the Comfort Zone Engineering Management The ASB Column Printer Keeps Production Running Equipment Briefs Better Than the Rest The Final Word

Snack Food & Wholesale Bakery - September 2008

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