Olde Thompson

After Olde Thompson branched out from manufacturing housewares to providing spices, the company’s leadership crafted an aggressive growth plan. When they realized that an aging, heavily customized SQL UNIX ERP system could no longer support their needs, it was time to look to the cloud.

You can’t drive growth with bad data. No business knows that better than Olde Thompson, the world’s largest manufacturer of salt and pepper mills. When the company shifted its focus from housewares to spices a decade ago, the business took off immediately – and the leadership team was hungry to maintain the trajectory.

Olde Thompson developed a growth plan that was not only aggressive but revealed huge gaps in the company’s technology infrastructure. To make the inroads it wanted to in the food service industry, the manufacturer needed a software platform that could support its vision.

“As we grew, one of our biggest challenges was to see what was coming down the pike,” recalls Marcus Merchant, Director of IT, Olde Thompson. “Our old ERP system offered no forecasting ability whatsoever.

Coordinating with our supply chain and planning production was almost like throwing darts. We were looking in the rearview mirror to see what was ahead of us—which is not how you want to run a business.”

“We were leaning heavily toward cloud solutions,” remarks Merchant. “Since we have a lean IT staff, cloud solutions mitigate risk for us.

Merchant and his team worked with the Plex Customer Success and Support (CSS) team to go live in 13 months. The process involved onboarding 65 new trading partners and making sure they could communicate through the new system via EDI.

“The Plex CSS team’s hands-on approach was a huge part of getting this project done to our satisfaction,” says Merchant. “Our Plex project manager visited us regularly and really studied our business to figure out how we needed things to run. He understood our nuances and was able to steer us away from short-sighted decisions so that we would end up with a system for both today and tomorrow.”

Increasing Efficiency, Reducing Waste

Although Olde Thompson is a food company, its manufacturing processes are discrete, with production lines filling tens of millions of spice bottles each year. Today, plant floor workers use mobile devices to access the Plex control panel that lets them move inventory through the company. Meanwhile, crew members on the assembly line use mounted tablets to record their production—giving the company’s decision-makers a real-time view of inventory. Team members can print labels right from their stations, stick them on pallets, and keep products moving out the door.

“Before Plex, we had to pre-print all of our finished goods labels,” recalls Merchant. “That often meant wasted labels and occasionally even resulted in mislabeled products. Plex has made us dramatically more efficient across our shop floor. There’s no longer a need for workers to run back and forth to desktop computers to record data.”

This newfound efficiency and centralized recordkeeping have made it easier for Olde Thompson to demonstrate compliance with a wide range of food industry regulations as a certified organic and certified kosher manufacturer. Plex also helps the company with traceability—an essential activity for any food producer.

Plex has definitely made our traceability exercises more trustworthy, Merchant reports. Within Plex, we can limit where we want our organic products and allergens to be stored. That minimizes the chances of products contaminating each other and could end up saving us significant money in the long run.

In the unlikely event of a product recall, Plex enables Olde Thompson to act quickly to protect its customers. The system provides upstream and downstream capabilities to track down products in minutes.

The previous plan we had in place for recalls was theoretically easy to execute or audit—unless there were any irregularities, Merchant explains. Then it became very difficult to locate products. Plex eliminates that risk by showing us each container that was shipped to each customer address—all on one screen—as well as what we still have left in stock.

Driving 99 Percent Service Rates With Strategic Insights

Plex has done more than simply enhance Olde Thompson’s existing processes—the platform has also delivered new capabilities to the company. Olde Thompson can now forecast sales, which

Meanwhile, Olde Thompson’s whole team has visibility into supplier performance, preventing them from getting caught off guard by delayed shipments.

“In the past, if supplies didn’t come in, we’d call the vendor and hear, ‘Oh, it hasn’t even been put on the ship yet,’ so we’d be looking at a 30- or 45-day delay,” Merchant explains. “Today, with Plex DemandCaster, we can see those delays as they’re happening and get in touch with suppliers sooner—and we can also look at supplier history to see how accurate their estimates have been so that we can plan accordingly.”

Olde Thompson’s business is remarkably stable, with little seasonality. But that hasn’t stopped the company from finding many unexpected uses for Plex DemandCaster.

“Plex DemandCaster has gone above and beyond what we expected,” Merchant says. “The platform gives us tremendous flexibility as far as using a previous item as a basis for forecasting a new one, or simply plugging in a different package size for an existing product and predicting demand based on that.”

Reducing Inventory by $10 Million During Rapid Growth

Thanks to the efficiency of doing business on Plex, Olde Thompson is approaching just-in-time delivery capabilities. The company has already reduced its inventory by $10 million. Savings like these have enabled the company to ramp up production without making a proportional increase in budget. And in the less than two years following Plex DemandCaster implementation, the company has become the largest private label spice supplier in the U.S.