The Combined Company Supports Food Manufacturing and Distributors Across Their Entire Manufacturing Lifecycle from Raw Materials to Accounting

SMITHFIELD, RI and MISSISSAUGA, ON, August 30, 2023 – CAI Software, LLC, (“CAI” or CAI Software”) a leader in integrated software and technology solutions for mission-critical, production-oriented enterprise resource planning (ERP), manufacturing execution systems (MES), eCommerce EDI (electronic data interchange) and warehouse management software (WMS) today announced that they have purchased Minotaur Software, Ltd.

The addition of Minotaur to the CAI portfolio adds robust food manufacturing and distribution functionality, enhancing capabilities across the entire manufacturing lifecycle from raw material purchasing, through receiving, warehouse movement, manufacturing, quality assurance (QA) and traceability, inventory control and handheld warehouse management, to order entry/invoicing, EDI, and accounting.

Minotaur connects office, plant, warehouse, and mobile workers so that data is available at the fingertips of food manufacturers. Together, CAI Software and Minotaur will serve the food industry including food and beverage processing, meat and seafood processing to commercial bakeries, nutraceutical, and chemical manufacturing, even distributors.

“Combining CAI Software and Minotaur brings key granular information for food manufacturers of all sizes to make more informed and timely business decisions in this ever-changing business environment,” said Brian Rigney, CEO of CAI Software. “As we bring the companies together, we will continue to collaborate with our customers to develop solutions purpose-built to serve the unique requirements of this industry. I look forward to working with the entire Minotaur team as we enter our next chapter of growth.”

Judith Kirkness, Vice President of Minotaur and now the Vice President of CAI Minotaur said, “We are excited to join forces with CAI to continue building reliable and relevant software and offering intelligent service to help support our customer’s growth and success. Our solution combined with CAI’s larger solution offering and depth of experience serves as a foundation for growing food manufacturers around the globe.”

William Chisholm, Managing Partner of STG, said, “Combining the strengths of CAI Software with Minotaur software will continue to strengthen our offerings to the food and beverage global industry. We look forward to working with our combined team to drive success for our employees, customers, and partners.”

About CAI Software

CAI Software, LLC is a leader in the delivery of mission-critical, production-oriented enterprise resource planning (ERP), manufacturing execution systems (MES), warehouse management software (WMS), electronic data interchange (EDI), and Enterprise Process Automation (EPA) software and services to leading companies in targeted vertical markets, including building materials, food processing, precious metals, manufacturing, and distribution.  For more information, please visit www.caisoft.com.

About Minotaur Software

Minotaur Software is a privately owned Canadian company specializing in traceability ERP software to support the unique requirements of food manufacturers and distributors. Our goal is to offer a practical yet comprehensive software solution that connects the office, plant, and warehouse for better visibility to information across the organization and to improve operational efficiencies. For more information, please visit www.minotaursoftware.com.

About STG

STG is a private equity partner to market leading companies in data, software, and analytics. The firm brings experience, flexibility, and resources to build strategic value and unlock the potential of innovative companies. Partnering to build customer-centric, market winning portfolio companies, STG creates sustainable foundations for growth that bring value to existing and future stakeholders. The firm is dedicated to transforming and building outstanding technology companies in partnership with world class management teams. STG’s expansive portfolio has consisted of more than 50 global companies. For more information, please visit http://www.stg.com/.

SaaS is a software delivery model where the software is hosted on a remote server owned by the software company and it is accessed over the internet. The user typically pays a subscription fee to use the software, which is delivered as a service. You don’t need a server to use these programs. Your data would reside on the server owned by the software provider and they would be responsible for updates, backups, etc. As long as you keep paying, you’d have access to the data and program.

Browser-based programs are software applications that are accessed through a web browser and can be placed either on a web server (often a second server you own onsite or in a data centre and a good idea if you plan to make these programs accessible to customers or others offsite) or on a virtual web server within your existing server, if it is to be accessed only by those within your organization.

Outward facing web servers can allow people outside your organization to interact with Minotaur, such as for B2B customers placing orders or for sharing documents with your customers such as if you co-pack and want to make inventory of raw materials you store for your customers or CofA’s available to them.

Or, they can be web-based applications designed just for use by those within your organization. These apps provide a new front end for interacting with your Minotaur program and many people enjoy the modern appearance, while not compromising the depth and reliability of the back-end program.

Minotaur has been working on some web-based applications that can make some Minotaur tasks easier and faster and the user interface is built with the latest and greatest web technologies. The programs leverage our over 35 years of experience in building a stable reliable robust ERP system and providing additional functionality to your existing Minotaur system.

Some of the programs we have been creating include:

1. A B2B web-based ordering system with a shopping cart, including the ability for your customers to login, view old invoices and outstanding orders.
2. A warehouse management overhead view with quick search for where items are in the warehouse. This can be set up to follow your physical warehouse layout
3. A Visual Calendar Based Production Planning Tool that allows you to plan production, move planned production to other days, and generate work orders for a day or a month at a time.
4. A Visual Calendar for scheduling live animal receiving for our Abattoir customers (could be adapted for scheduling deliveries for other customers)
5. A new traceability report for those who produce serialized product. It is a highly targeted report that provides for rapid audit response to a particular query type.  On a given date, show me the production for a given product, what you made, what is left in stock, how much was sold and who it was sold to.  It typically produces results on the most complex data in just a few seconds.
6. We have begun work on the flip side of that report which is to trace a raw ingredient that have a long life by lot in your production process.  Sugar for example where the lot could be used for a few weeks worth of production and therefore vast recall details required for mock and real recalls.  Once complete we expect it to also run very fast.  It is targeted specifically for producers that output serialized cases of finished goods.

Talk to us today if you’d like to see a demonstration or add some of the programs to your Minotaur system.

In this video, Judith presents to a Meat Processors Association talking about traceability from live animal through further processing and getting meat back to your customers using technology to streamline so you can grow your business and process more with the same people.

During my over 25 years spent helping small and mid-sized food manufacturers implement technology such as ERP, manufacturing and warehouse management systems, I’ve worked with a number of Consultants who were hired to assist businesses with their search for software. The Consultant often prepares the RFP (Request For Proposal) that includes an introduction to the company, what they are using now to manage their information needs and typically a spreadsheet detailing the specific needs of that company. They then send that RFP out to ERP providers who they feel will be a good software fit for their customer.

As an Author and Traceability Consultant myself, I work with companies to conduct traceability audits and provide operational guidance on implementing technology in a plant or warehouse where previously written logs and Excel sheets prevailed. The client doesn’t know what technology is best so they rely on the Consultant to guide them to solutions that can help them get traceability, inventory control and recipe yield management.

If the Consultant does ERP Search Consulting across many industries, they likely have developed a standard spreadsheet of needs that they adapt for each client. Food manufacturing is different however and the RFP should reflect those differences. To assist Consultants with making a food industry specific RFP, I have assembled some key concepts that you could include as part of a food manufacturer’s RFP:

1. Multi-input, Multi-output manufacturing that can manage waste/rework and calculate costs without needing an individual run for each output. While widget manufacturers take a bunch of things and make one from them, food manufacturers often take a bunch of inputs including ingredients, packaging, perhaps labour or overhead components and make a batch of either an interim or finished good and then portion that batch off into multiple sized containers. Perhaps they make a vat of juice and then portion it to individual serve containers for food service as well as 1 L or 2 L containers for grocery stores. Multiple inputs made into multiple outputs and the lot numbers on all those inputs need to be connected to all those outputs for traceability and for determining a final cost for each end product. Most food manufacturing also has a waste component and sometimes the company has to pay to get rid of that waste. Knowing the yield on each batch helps management ensure that staff in the plant are performing up to the expected standards. It is rare that a recipe that expects to get 1,000 muffins yields exactly that quantity, so while a recipe standard with waste needs to be established, the actual cost of each batch will vary.
2. Recall reporting for production that takes multiple days. Many of my customers produce an product and package it off on another day, and this can pose a challenge to many traceability systems. The finished good may get labelled with the date it is packaged, but the production took place on another day. Recall reports need to tie these together. If there was an issue in the plant such as a failed metal detection test, or equipment cleaning issue, the system needs to know the day the interim product was made and tie that to the finished product produced from it.
3. Code 128 barcodes—producing and reading them. Code 128 barcodes are the standard for case labelling in certain verticals of the food industry, such as meat, cheese, chocolate and for fruits and vegetables from around the world. It is also increasingly being adopted across other food and packaging items. This is because a code 128 is a barcode that can contain multiple pieces of information that can be captured in a single scan. These pieces need to include an item code, and lot number at a minimum. There are 99 possible segments that could be in these barcodes and other segments could include a date of manufacture or packaging, the weight of that individual case or unit, the country of origin, to name a few. Knowing the ERP solution can work with these types of barcode rather than requiring all those important elements in separate barcodes will save time scanning and relabeling in the warehouse. Since traceability is often a driver for these companies to get ERP systems, it is critical that their warehouse management solution do more than identify the item, it needs to help with expiry date tracking and lot number tracing. If the product is a variable weight product, then the weight in a code 128 is also critical information.
4. Integration of Plant Floor, Warehouse and Office. Product may be shipped before the entire batch is finished being made. Since negative inventory and lot control don’t work (which lot # went negative?), the need for lot traceability requires that inputs be received before they are used in production, interim products need to be made before they are used in finished products and finished goods must be produced before they can be sold. Of course, that is what happens in real life, but getting that information into a system in a timely way can be a challenge for some companies and software. Whether for space or short shelf-life freshness reasons, the food industry will often produce and ship some immediately, even before the full batch is finished. I have had customers that need to get a shipment on the road even before QC has released it if the product must travel several days and the shelf life is short. The product gets the go ahead to ‘release’ it to the client, while it is on the road to its destination. This means it is imperative that the production floor have a live method to easily record items as made in inventory, with a lot number, so that they can immediately be moved around a warehouse or shipped out on a customer order.

These are just four common requirements that most of my food manufacturing clients need. To help ERP Consultants ensure their food clients find software providers that can truly help them grow their business more easily, it’s important they ask the right questions in their RFP.

I share even more ideas on practically implementing technology in my book titled Traceability for Food Manufacturers: How to be ready for Blockchain available from Amazon worldwide. Please also email me to request a copy of my spreadsheet of questions that I use in my own Consulting practice to assess the current state of technology and to help define the needs for food manufacturing and distribution businesses. As a Consultant, you clients rely on you knowing what they don’t know.

On-Premise software programs are installed on a server at your business location (or one of your locations, if you have multiple sites). They are a good choice if you like to own your data, and be in control of access to it or if your available internet options are not ideal for supporting the needs for the number of users you have. If you want to connect plant floor equipment such as weigh scales, this is often more feasible through a local area network (LAN) within your facility; whereas many scale and other production equipment may not be designed to transmit information to a SAAS program. If you want the program configured to your processes or customized to ensure it meets your unique needs, an on-premise program could be your best choice. Offsite access is still possible for those working from home or connecting from offsite locations through a variety of apps that allow users to hop onto the server from various devices. Some companies run their ERP software on-premise, but set backups to save to the cloud, for off-site piece of mind.

A hybrid approach would see you contracting with an ‘infrastructure as a service’ (IAAS) provider like AWS (Amazon Web Service), Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud or a similar ‘server service’ offered by a smaller, local service provider. Local providers may used one of the big providers in the background or have their own data centre filled with servers. Some businesses, who enjoy good internet service, and who might be accustomed to using SAAS programs, prefer to not purchase an onsite server, making IAAS a good hybrid option to consider when moving up to an ERP program. It offers the advantage of not needing to invest in a server (like you would with the on-premise model), with the comfort of knowing you own your own data and control access to it (because it is NOT a SAAS program, simply an on-premise program you buy and license, but access on a cloud server that you control). Often these server services cost about $400-500 USD/month.

Program updates with Minotaur are accepted and made live on your timeline, with the option to do testing and training in a sandbox environment in advance of pushing any new features to users.

Onsite servers are often the least expensive long-term option (starting at $3,000 USD and up), and servers can last 5-8 years or more. Investing in a good server or ensuring a cloud provider dedicates enough RAM and processing speed to your company, is critical to providing the best program processing and screen refresh speed affecting the overall user experience.

Minotaur offers on-premise or hybrid deployment models, where you decide which model makes most sense for your business.

Compare Apples to Apples

When comparing options to determine the best software program fit and model of deployment for your business, a number of factors come into play. Ensuring the program itself can do what you need it to do, is most important. If it is not a step up from what you are using now, why change? Cost is another important factor. If you invest the time and money to switch programs, you want to be confident you’ll achieve meaningful business efficiency improvements and the advantages you went looking for. Training and service model is another key factor. Do your staff work best interacting by phone, by email, through remote support or are they comfortable submitting tickets with screen shots? How fast will support be offered when you need help. Compatibility in how you do business is important for growing companies. These are all important factors when choosing your software supplier.

When comparing cost of ownership of SAAS programs vs. On-Premise or Hybrid models, we recommend looking at about an 8 to 10 year timeline. For SAAS programs, be sure to ask about any minimum contract length, initial implementation, training and set up service fees, plus hardware requirements for the printers or computers you will use to access that program. Add to it any increased internet service costs, including ensuring you plan for a backup internet option, such as a cellular hub to keep on hand, since continual access to the internet will be required for your users to always have access to the program.

For on-premise programs, add the program cost, plus any annual license or maintenance fees, to the cost for any infrastructure upgrades you might need, such as a new server, with the database cost and implementation training and services.

On-Premise software providers often offer a monthly payment plan to allow you to spread the cost of the initial software license over time. Understand that that monthly price will often go DOWN, once the initial license fee is paid off, to reflect the fact that you then just be paying any ongoing annual license and maintenance fees.

Choosing the right software supplier for such an important part of your business (the program that manages all your business information) will help set you up to scale your company effectively, doing more with the people you have. At Minotaur, we aim to help make your growth easier!

Do you import products, acting as a selling agent for a country or territory? Increased regulations around traceability for product recalls have expanded the record keeping requirements for many distributors. Some need to relabel product to meet local language labelling and allergen identification rules. Others offer value added services like kitting to make the product more attractive to the local market.

If you bring a product in, relabel it, and sell it to major retailers, for example, you are expected to track the lot numbers just like the manufacturer of the food you distribute. Some distributors offer services such as bundling products together for customers like Costco. Maybe you take two flavours of a product and put one of each into a new package, making a new sku. This kitting process is a form of manufacturing and the software technology manufacturers use could make managing these situations easier.

Some food companies are more marketing and product development businesses. They develop innovative food products and then have them manufactured by a co-packer. Sometimes, these marketing companies take responsibility for procuring some or all of the raw materials that will be used by the co-packer to manufacture their product. For example, they may ship certain key ingredients or labels for use in manufacturing their products. Like manufacturers, they need to keep track of use and waste of the raw materials so they know when to buy and send more. Sometimes, they will receive the manufactured product back into their own warehouse to distribute and sometimes they’ll contract with third party warehouses or 3PL firms to pick up the product from the manufacturer and either store it until it is purchased, or deliver it directly to the customer.

Whether manufacturing is done onsite or at a third party, the planning for the combining of multiple inputs to make one or more outputs is the same as they are for the manufacturer who needs to keep track of raw materials becoming interim and finished goods.

Many manufacturers are also distributors. Whether they own a separate company for distribution, or arrange transport with third parties, they have to get their goods to their customers. Both manufacturers and distributors spend time calculating product costs, often incorporating additional costs to get the products to them as well as calculating finished goods product costs which may involve paying broker fees or retailer charge backs. Both need to plan purchases, devise inventory management and lot control strategies, and stay aware of expiry dates to avoid fines and ensure the food safety of the products they sell.

As a company in the food or consumer packaged goods industry, an industry that operates on thin margins, whether you think of yourself as a distributor, a manufacturer or a co-packer, you have to devise ways to effectively and efficiently manage information and monitor pricing and profitability. If you are frustrated with duplicate entry, disconnected systems or a large amount of manual paperwork, and looking for a better way to keep track of all that information, ERP systems like the Minotaur Business System may be the answer. With an industry specific focus, Minotaur offers software that aims to make your growth easier by combining tools to manage the plant, warehouse and office in one program.

Over 40% of Canadian food recalls are triggered by undeclared allergens. While the foods may be safe to eat for those without the affected allergy, they can be deadly for those with the allergy. Therefore, despite not being inherently unsafe to eat, all the lots of affected products must be brought back. This results in substantial costs for the manufacturer and/or distributor involved, beyond the damage to their brand reputation. Rebuilding consumer trust will require additional marketing dollars, adding to an already very expensive mistake. In many cases, those allergen recalls were the result of operational failings that could have been prevented with the right systems in place.

An allergen recall can be due to a product being issued in the wrong packaging. Perhaps you make similar products, one with nuts, and one without. One of your warehouse workers picks the wrong packaging and you end up putting your nut-filled product into the no-nut packaging and shipping that product out. This type of error may not be caught by QC staff, as they may be focused on ensuring the product is of high quality and safe to consume. If using a pen and paper system, the picker may note on paperwork that they picked the correct packaging, because they truly thought they did.

In other recalls, it may have been a purchasing error. When placing an order for a raw material from an approved supplier, the purchaser may learn that the supplier is out of stock on a needed ingredient. If the supplier is a larger supplier with multiple plants, they may offer to send you a substitute from another facility. If the purchaser did not confirm that the other facility has the required certifications in place (was nut-free or kosher certified for example) and that location doesn’t share the same certifications, and if the substituted was received, used in manufacturing, with the end product being released to consumers, you could again find yourself in a recall position.

These operational errors tend to fall into one of two classes. The first is a documentation compliance failing, where the original recipe required specific suppliers and ingredients that when not available caused a breakdown in communication of what substitutes would be acceptable. The second is transactional, where a warehouse picking mistake was not caught before product was produced and released. Sometimes the volume of information and continued use of pen and paper systems makes catching these errors challenging. While QC/QA staff are often trained in food safety and traceability, they are only part of the puzzle in minimizing your risk of mistakes and recall.

Do you train your operations staff in inventory control, barcoding, traceability, and information management systems? A combination of education and systems can help you catch errors, before product has been released, reducing your recall risk and preserving your brand reputation with your customers.

Originally published in Food in Canada Magazine click here.

So how can a computerized traceability system prevent these errors from happening? First is through the use of scanning. If the recipe calls for a specific ingredient or packaging and the picker scans the wrong ingredient, the system can immediately alert the picker, averting an operational failure. For purchasing, a system that tracks all the needed attributes so that if a substitute is required, makes it easy for the purchaser to verify the documentation requirements for the new item can help avoid a compliance failure. Talk to us today if you need a better system.

Internal traceability is the responsibility of each food processor, and a requirement to satisfy GFSI (Global Food Safety Initiative programs like SQF or BRC), as well as government and large customer requirements. The internal traceability of the manufacturer becomes one piece in supply chain traceability puzzle.

Supply chain traceability is the tracking of an ingredient, or item, along the supply chain from its origin through any products it is used in making and along its journey to the end consumer. It extends across a variety of different companies. For food items, supply chain traceability involves tracking from a farmer to a variety of carriers, to processors, distributors, retailers and finally to the consumer.

Minotaur specializes in helping companies get control of their internal traceability, through the use of our traceability ERP software program. ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning and that can mean different things to different software developers. For a better understanding of what ERP software includes and what it can do for your business, read our blog on ERP.

Supply chain traceability is already being done in some segments of the food industry and many of the projects to achieve supply chain traceability involve using blockchain technology (see article on Blockchain and how close we are) to pull the information from the individual companies involved in that supply chain together.

Walmart has some supply chain requirements for fresh fruits and vegetables suppliers tracking products from farmers to warehouse or store. They started with products that aren’t transformed in the journey from farm to consumer, such as fresh fruits. That was a good place to start, because manufacturing introduces some real complexity in the tracing challenge. It’s not just retailers who have jumped on the supply chain traceability bandwagon. Starbucks has a supply chain blockchain going to track ‘beans to cup’ so that consumers can scan a package of beans and see exactly where they came from. In each of these supply chain programs, participating companies who touch the product report certain information to the blockchain when they handle the product. For example, they must report when they take possession and where they ship it. Canada has had live animal supply chain traceability from farm to primary processor going for many years. This has been done through tagging animals like cows at the farm with an RFID tag. That tag can be scanned to more easily record movement and while the information is not stored in a block chain, it is stored in a central database. These databases of information can be mined in the event of a recall, to try to quickly identify the origin of any issues.

Manufacturing complicates the attempts at achieving supply chain traceability because each raw material chain ends with the processor. The item that arrives at the processor is not the same item that leaves. A new product emerges that contains the raw ingredients and becomes the start of a new chain. It is therefore critical that food manufacturers achieve internal traceability, so that when they are asked, they have the information available to feed a supply chain traceability program.

Manufacturers will be able to use different software programs to collect their pieces of data, as long as those programs are able to contribute the required pieces to the chosen blockchain when the time comes. These requests to participate in supply chain traceability projects will come from your customers, starting with larger customers like retailers, so participating may not be optional if you want to keep supplying those companies. Ensuring you get your traceability stored electronically will not only save you time when facing audits or a recall, but will prepare you to be ready to share the relevant bits and pieces with customer block chains when you are asked.

If you run Minotaur Software, you can be confident that the information you might be asked to provide is already being tracked electronically. Talk to us if your manufacturing company wants to be ready for supply chain traceability.