Core Business System Development for a Food Manufacturer

Background & Challenge

At food manufacturers, factory floor status has often been tracked with paper, whiteboards, and spreadsheets, making it difficult for head-office management to see real-time conditions on a distant factory floor. On the sales side, discount and trade-promotion terms with wholesalers and retailers were often complex and opaque, and management could not clearly see how much they were affecting each sales rep's profit margin. Results by region were also compiled by hand each time from spreadsheet data exported from the existing core system, leaving management with limited means to spot underperforming regions early. To address these challenges, a core business system spanning sales, production/manufacturing, and management has been built, supporting faster management decisions.

Udzuki's Role

End-to-end development of three core systems

Gathered requirements that differed by department — from quoting, shipping, and demand forecasting to production/manufacturing planning, inventory, and management dashboards — and developed them from scratch, end to end

Automated reading of wholesaler discount/rebate statements

Automatically reads PDF condition statements covering discounts and trade-promotion rebates from each wholesaler, through to generating payment statements, reducing what had been manual data entry

Sales performance dashboard by gross profit and region

Visualizes not just revenue but gross profit (after discounts and returns) by nation, region, sales rep, and customer, alongside year-over-year comparisons, surfacing each salesperson's real contribution to profit

Implemented QR-code-based lot traceability

Linked raw material receiving, manufacturing, and shipping via QR codes, enabling lot-level tracking and traceback

Production/manufacturing planning with allergen visibility

Visualizes allergens accumulated on each production line from prior jobs, supporting decisions on when a cleaning step is needed

Remote monitoring dashboard for factory floor status

Digitized floor status that had previously been tracked on a whiteboard, providing real-time visibility from head office