Caroli manufactures with Charisma

The company
Caroli, the second largest company within Romanian sausage industry, distinguished itself in the past years on an extremely competitive market. With a turnover of more than EUR 70 million and around 1,300 employees, Caroli ensures fresh sausages manufacturing and distribution on a national level.

Caroli Group owns 8 locations in Piteşti, Bucharest, Cluj, Timişoara, Constanţa, Galaţi, Braşov and Bacău and includes two major business lines: a manufacturing component, managed by TC AFFAIRES, and a distribution component, conducted by Caroli Prod 2000.


The situation
One of the challenges the management of a company group is facing is making decisions that positively affect the entire group, not just a business line. To this respect, using a software infrastructure that provides an overview is vital. The two Caroli Group components were using different software applications for operations management, which led to an extremely difficult data centralization operation, especially because of different master tables and charts of accounts.

Caroli Prod 2000 was using a DOS solution for billing, inventory management and accounting. The main problems raised by this application were the difficulty of managing the price lists, the extremely stiff process of retrieving data transmitted by subsidiaries to the location in Bucharest for centralization.

TC AFFAIRES was managing its operations via several modules developed in FOXPRO, that were working independently from each other and did not allow getting correct information on stock and raw material requisition. At the same time, the monthly manufacturing closing was difficult and required for a technical person to get involved, and the manufacturing reports were incomplete, difficult to maintain, containing old data. In addition, the manufacturing module did not allow the calculation of a manufacturing cost that included both direct and indirect expenses, and the cost center concept was completely missing.

In choosing a software solution, the representatives in all the company departments have attended live demos of several software solutions. The offers were assessed, each solution getting a score. The final decision was made based on this score, Charisma Enterprise standing out thanks to its flexibility, compliance with the Romanian law and competitive price.


The solution
The first step in implementing Charisma was preparing the specifications, based on the discussions with Caroli representatives, followed by data import and deployment of Charisma Enterprise solution along with the following modules: accounting, financials, purchasing, inventory management, fixed assets, human resources, payroll, BI, logistics, timesheet access, vehicle park, maintenance, market spy.

An important component of the solution was the manufacturing module, which tracks all the stages of the manufacturing process: order release, supply scheduling, business unit planning and manufacturing flow tracking, manufacturing order management, automatically generated order monitoring, managing and assessing purchase orders, cost assessment, validating each manufacturing flow step, finished manufacturing vs. ongoing manufacturing reporting. Month-end closing doesn't need a technical person to get involved, as the data are now available in real time.

One of the features developed within the project was also the manufacturing cost calculation with direct and indirect section expenses, as well as integrating the scales within the manufacturing process. Practically, one can now directly record the products resulted during the manufacturing process right from the scale.

Although the two businesses operate each on its own database, on a group level these are retrieved and processed with BI component (Charisma Analyzer). Thus, one can make strategic decisions regarding the progress of the two business lines based on updated, relevant, detail and real-time information provided by the ERP solution.  


The results
After implementing the integrated information system, the results appeared fast. Caroli Group has the possibility to consistently manage the two businesses, by integrating the manufacturing operations with the sales and distribution operations. Moreover, by implementing SFA (Sales Force Automation) module, which requires the use of portable terminals for entering customer orders, one can perform the followings:

• clear and real-time records by product categories
• sales distribution by region and sales persons
• order tracking (invoiced and not invoiced)
• invoice tracking (collected or not)
• use of portable terminals to enter customer orders

"The first thing that comes to my mind is the accuracy of information. Charisma reports come just in time and include information we rely on. By implementing the Business Intelligence solution, Charisma Analyzer, we hope to get more in the managerial reports field”. Mioara Abagiu, Software Administrator, Caroli Group.

Case study revised in 2008.