Streamlining Ordering, Production and Logistics at Busken Bakery
Busken Bakery is a family-owned chain with ten retail stores, a catering service, hundreds of wholesale accounts and outlets at 14 local grocery stores. Founded in 1928, its quality and longevity have made Busken a household name throughout Cincinnati.
Well into the 1990s, a paper-based internal process was the mechanism by which Busken’s large variety of award-winning products, fresh-baked at their main location, was ordered, produced and delivered daily to all their stores. While the system worked well, it was labor-intensive and inflexible. Large pre-printed spreadsheets, coded in seven different colors for the days of the week, were filled out at each location to indicate quantities of each product needed by that store in coming days. These order sheets were then hand-carried on Busken’s delivery trucks back to headquarters. All the sheets from all the stores for a given day would be arranged side-by-side with product names aligned. Order counts across all stores were tallied with ruler, pencil and calculator. These individual product counts (which could be in combinations of, for example, dozens, packages or each) then had to be manually aggregated and converted to the units of measure used in production (often pans or dozens).
Even without looking at every minor detail, it is easy to imagine the challenges that were presented by other aspects of the business as well. All of those baked goods, in the specific quantities ordered by each store, needed to be divided up and loaded into the fleet of delivery trucks and sent to the proper destination every morning – and this with the added pressure of a one-day shelf life for donuts, bagels, danish and many other products. Wholesale items also needed to be packaged and delivered, with invoices attached. Point-of-sale figures from all stores were manually transcribed from cash-register slips into a spreadsheet program in order to generate cash journal reports and sales summaries. And even after all this effort, there was no effective way of searching, reviewing and analyzing historical sales and production data apart from physically combing through paper archives.
Unlock, Capture, Connect
At a 90-minute meeting in early 1997, KB3 Technical Systems began to unlock Busken Bakery’s business processes and data that had long been tied to their system of paper forms and isolated Lotus 123 spreadsheets. Within weeks, the first prototype of the new database application took shape, having captured much of the basic functionality in software.
The central office soon began using this new electronic system. The transition was eased by retaining, to as great a degree as possible, the layout, product-listing-order and appearance of the familiar pre-printed forms – even to the point of replicating the daily color-coding in the background for the different screens displayed for each day of the week. Over time, the entire Busken operation and all store locations were migrated to a fully-integrated, remotely-hosted “thin client” environment – a server-based solution that reduces cost and eases the task of managing and upgrading all office software systems.
The new multi-user Order and Production Database is accessible from all store locations, facilitating instant communication of orders and sales data, conversion of order quantities into production quantities, easy updates to product offerings, customer records and baking schedules, and automatic generation of packing lists, invoices and up-to-the-minute critical business reports.