The UK’s largest national butcher for the catering sector is increasing the consistency of its end product quality using an enterprise resource planning (ERP) tool from industry software manufacturers Columbus.
Fairfax Meadow supplies high quality meats to businesses in the hotel, food retail and travel sectors. The installation of its new Columbus RapidValue software, built within Microsoft Dynamics AX, will allow the company to map its existing processes and streamline them for efficiency.
Tony Carlisle, who is leading the project for Fairfax Meadow, said: “At present there are spreadsheets in use for planning and reporting, but we want to have everything going through the ERP system.
“To increase efficiency we need to change the way we work. RapidValue helps us understand how we can become more efficient and what we need to do to improve our processes for when we upgrade. By comparing existing business processes to the standard functionality in AX, we were able to identify a number of manual processes and duplications of effort.”
The implementation of the new system follows previous measures by Fairfax Meadow to ensure the quality of its end product. It has already invested in new equipment and made simple process changes for operators in the factory. The new system will lead to an increase in the visibility of data and real-time reporting, the company says, making it easier to check progress against production targets and facilitate key decision making.
The company said: “The tool enables Fairfax Meadow to view all of its processes, requirements documents, risk assessment and supply chain information… centralised within AX. Previously, these documents were all saved in separate locations on the company server, which led to a more disjointed and time consuming approach to projects. By having everything in one place, Fairfax Meadow benefits from greater visibility of data in its ERP solution which can easily be shared with multiple departments within the organisation.
“Fairfax Meadow expects implementation of changes to be supported by RapidValue, with time and money savings attached.”
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