Why Cybake is the best bet for bakery ERP
Bakeries moving from old software face a choice: migrate to a specialist system or go for a big-brand ERP package.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that they often choose the latter. After all, the major ERP vendors have spent fortunes on building mindshare among business folk over decades. Their reassuringly expensive systems are used by large corporations all over the world. What could possibly go wrong?
Judging from what we are told by bakers that reach out to us following unsuccessful ERP migrations, the answer would appear to be “quite a lot”.
Bakeries are usually moving away from old, on-premises systems that were heavily customized over the years to meet their individual requirements. When they move to a large ERP vendor’s more general cloud counterpart, many of these built-in, baking-specific nuances get lost.
Some ERP systems struggle with the fact that bakers don’t make goods strictly to order, and that production is underway before final orders are in.
They may find it hard, for example, to adjust standing orders. Getting historical sales data for forecasting production may be difficult, and invoicing and reporting haphazard. Even connection to POS systems can be a problem for retail bakers.
A bakery with an old, customized system should find a specialist, bakery-specific ERP platform a better bet. In practically all cases, the important nuances that bakeries had built-in to their original systems are all addressed by ours.
Continuous improvement
If they are not, it is highly likely that they can be added. It’s one of the ways we continuously improve our software.
With a big ERP vendor, you are one user among tens of thousands of customers, including huge global corporations, far removed from the vendor’s programming coalface. But with a niche specialist like Cybake, you are talking directly to the people who develop the system.
It’s not just bakeries that have problems in this area. According to recent estimates by Gartner, over 70% recently implemented ERP initiatives will fail to fully meet their original goals. And as many as 25% of these will fail catastrophically.
From the perspective of a niche leader like ourselves, these figures seem shocking. Maybe it’s because we only have hundreds, rather than thousands, of customers, the idea of a failed project doesn’t really compute. If something doesn’t work, our in-house developers fix it.
ERP migration is very much the bread and butter of our business. These projects make up a huge chunk of our work. Instead of a big bang, rip and replace approach, we use a tried and tested step-by-step process. And we pride ourselves on our skill, built up over 27 years, at making the process as smooth as possible.
Large amounts of time, money and effort are at stake when a baking business modernizes its systems. Moving to an industry-specific solution like Cybake means this gamble is much more likely to pay off.
Modernizing your bakery management systems? Book a demo today to see how Cybake cuts admin, improves efficiency and increases sales.
Rachel Hindle is the Global Sales & Marketing Manager of Cybake.
