RM Foods, a 50-year-old food and beverage manufacturer and distributor, has evolved from a supplier to El Torito and Acapulco restaurants into a much larger customer base that now includes Trader Joe’s, Costco, Sam’s Club, and Whole Foods. The company started with no functional ERP system, which put them at a disadvantage when it came to managing and tracking their business. RM Foods conducted a very successful, phased implementation of Sage ERP X3. The ERP system now enables RM Foods to run its business more profitably by increasing data accuracy and offering more visibility into product and production data. This is especially critical to the company, which is changing its profile from distributor to manufacturer. Michael Siegmund, president of RM Foods, was already familiar with Sage Software products. He used this experience as a food and manufacturing consultant to his advantage for a successful ERP implementation. Siegmund and RM Foods adopted their operating procedures to the software, and not the other way around.

The ERP implementation team had people who were experts in the business and who knew how systems worked in their business. The project team included Sage consultants, as well as consultants from RM Foods who understood how RM Foods did business. RM Foods chose to do a very basic ERP implementation. They trained all their users to manage the system effectively.

A year ago, the parent company of RM Foods came out of bankruptcy (which nearly killed Siegmund’s division). The company’s post-bankruptcy growth is at triple the revenue in less than a year. Siegmund expects RM Foods to double that growth in another year, and this pace would be impossible without an ERP system such as the Sage ERP X3.

Formerly, RM Foods employees used Excel spreadsheets to get quotes to prospective customers, with a two-week turnaround time. The Sage ERP X3 system shortened the response time to 48 hours, and it can further reduce it to two hours once they implement the routing in Sage.

The RM Foods Sage ERP X3 implementation shows how best practices, including a phased ERP implementation that industry expert consultants support, can create an ERP system that offers greater customer responsiveness and enables accelerated business transformation.

Identify the role of the project team.
What was the strategy the company adopted for ERP implementation?
Explain how the ERP implementation has helped the company get better results.
Is there a relationship between the ERP implementation strategy that RM Foods adopted and the final results the company attained? What are your views?