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Enterprise Resource Planning Essential Amid Strong Market Growth

Ruprecht, a sous vide cooked protein maker, integrates an ERP system purpose-built for food processing to build its Industry 4.0 foundation, helping operations better align with—and gain insights into—finance matters.

Ruprecht provides proteins cooked sous vide, a safe cooking process that vacuum seals the food and places it in temperature-controlled water.
Ruprecht provides proteins cooked sous vide, a safe cooking process that vacuum seals the food and places it in temperature-controlled water.
Photo courtesy of Ruprecht

Founded in 1860 in the heart of the city’s meatpacking district, Ruprecht is the oldest operating beef processor in the Chicago area. But its manufacturing technologies are anything but outdated—the company is using digital innovations to optimize its growth.

Ruprecht provides proteins cooked sous vide, a safe cooking process that vacuum seals the food and places it in temperature-controlled water.Ruprecht provides proteins cooked sous vide, a safe cooking process that vacuum seals the food and places it in temperature-controlled water.Photo courtesy of RuprechtRuprecht provides raw and fully cooked proteins for restaurants, foodservice, club store and retail outlets. It has been growing rapidly over the past 10 years with investments in R&D and an expanded focus on sous vide protein products. Since its purchase in 2014 by a private equity fund, the company has been positioning itself for growth and scalability. CFO Frank Patton has been instrumental in that growth since joining Ruprecht, helping the company achieve its goals through Industry 4.0 innovations. Key to that has been his efforts to integrate an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system from Syspro.

Before a manufacturer can digitalize, it needs a strong digital foundation on which to build. When Patton arrived in 2018, Ruprecht was managing its finances with QuickBooks and a home-grown ERP system, neither of which was integrated with other systems in the company.

It’s the same story that’s been told time and again about multi-generational family businesses, Patton contends. Technology investments are not typically top of mind. “At Ruprecht, there were some pretty decent investments made. When I walked in the door, I was rather impressed to see that they actually had a data warehouse in existence, and they had some BI [business intelligence] capabilities,” he says. “But what it really lacked was a backbone that made some sense for the foreseeable future. We were operating on a homegrown ERP package that essentially evolved from pencil and paper.”

That system was designed to remove some of the burden from the operations team, but it lacked a lot of the financial capabilities that Patton considers essential for manufacturing operations, such as bill of materials, standard costing capabilities, production scheduling, and the ability to track inventory on the shop floor.


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“As a food and beverage manufacturer, we have some unique characteristics, specifically on the protein side with being able to yield products,” Patton notes, commenting on the raw primal that has to be cut into specific sized portions, with byproducts and scraps needing to be accounted for as well.

As Ruprecht looked for the ERP system that would be the right fit for its operations, it didn’t want to “buy a Ferrari and drive it like a Chevy,” Patton says. “We wanted to make sure we could actually get the value out of it.” Above all, he wanted to get away from the feeling that the business was managing them vs. them managing the business.

He explains how the company’s make-to-order model tended to work: “We would scramble around here and try to do what we needed to do, and would be highly successful, but we really didn’t understand the labor content. And to the extent that we really could, we didn’t understand what that cost meant to our business,” he says. “It was the same with the ability to measure things like labor utilization. If I have a standard build, and it says it should take me two hours to produce this product, if it took me three, I would never know it.” Patton could calculate margins on a meaningful level only at the end of the month, he adds, missing insights throughout the month about how various products are performing.

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