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Mennel Milling embraces enterprise integration

Mennel Milling Company recently expanded its business model by acquiring a legacy bakery and packaging plant in 2016. The acquisition provided an excellent opportunity to modernize the plant and update enterprise resource planning software for better enterprise integration.

Mennel Milling Company’s acquisition of a General Mills’ bakery and packaging plant in 2016 proved to be a great opportunity to modernize enterprise software systems.
Mennel Milling Company’s acquisition of a General Mills’ bakery and packaging plant in 2016 proved to be a great opportunity to modernize enterprise software systems.

Enterprise integration in manufacturing is a hot topic these days, and food producers are recognizing that advances in industrial networking are creating opportunities for companies to connect disparate application platforms. Gaining efficiencies with raw material management, improved quality control processes and optimizing uptime are just some of the benefits of integrated enterprise applications. 

One obstacle to this manufacturing objective is plant acquisitions and the legacy platform integration issues that come along with it.

One recent example of this type of challenge was Mennel Milling Company’s acquisition of a General Mills’ bakery and packaging plant in 2016. Mennel expanded its business model with this acquisition by offering more than just ingredients and moved into selling a full line of bakery mix products.

Part of the plant acquisition agreement included the elimination of the existing SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) software and IBM’s Maximo enterprise asset management (EAM) platform. Mennel’s ERP platform is Microsoft’s Dynamics, and the plant acquisition created an opportunity for the food producer to move to the cloud-based Dynamics 365 business platform to also manage fulfillment forecasting and warehousing for the plant.

Mennel enlisted consulting company enVista to integrate Dynamics 365, Microsoft Azure, SharePoint and Office 365. For the manufacturing operations management component, Stone Technologies, Inc., a system integrator based in St. Louis, Missouri, oversaw the removal of a custom manufacturing execution system (MES) and connection of the new MES to Mennel’s new business platform. 

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