Palmerston Bakery
Palmerston Bakery, in Palmerston, Northern Territory, was the first business in Australia to get up and running with Cybake bakery management software.
A wholesaler that started out as a hot bread shop in 1995, Palmerston Bakery can produce up to 20,000 bread rolls each day.
General manager Bryan Seears says: “We had a bespoke system before. It was built specifically for us many years ago. It was a good system, don’t get me wrong, but it just wasn’t keeping up with the trends. So, things like the weekly order schedule for customers in Cybake is a godsend for us.”
Expanding on the comparison, Bryan says: “In our old system, we had to keep a proforma, which was our standing order, and then we’d have to go back change it and go back and forth, and it built its standing orders from a previous invoice, so it was just a bit more clunky. Cybake is more streamlined.”
Getting more streamlined is a reality that many small to medium wholesale bakeries now face with rising labor costs, energy tariffs and wheat prices.
Bryan explains: “It means that the supply is being squeezed. Because wheat’s not coming out of Ukraine, the prices go up and we’re the little guy in the middle. People see us a big operator, but we’re nowhere near the sort of size of the Goodman Fielder types who are doing 60 or 80 ton a week. We’re doing 12-15 ton; we’re paying two-to-three hundred dollars a ton more, just for our flour. So, we’re very sensitive to that. We have to absorb quite a bit of it just to keep the volume up.”
Bryan says that using Cybake enables Palmerston Bakery to gain a competitive edge over the big food corporations.
“We can’t even begin to compete on price, but we can certainly blow them out of the water on customer service as we’re a more agile team, and so Cybake helps us to do that.”
Mobility
He also highlights the flexibility and mobility that Cybake brings to his business:
“It is the fact that I can log in from anywhere to check it. It’s a public holiday here in the Northern Territories today and I’ve been at home doing some work. The boys in the bakery, they ring me and say: ‘Listen boss, we think this is wrong on the production list, can you check it for us?’.
“I just log in on the computer and cross reference it with a purchase order that has come in through the email and give them a call back to say everything is correct. Whereas, previously, to do that, I’d have had to go into the office.”
Bryan continues: “With the other system, of course, you either had full access or you had no access. And the fact that we can tailor Cybake to some extent is good as well. I think the big ticket is control. Control for our production team and admin. There’s just more control – it’s easier to access the information that we’ve got.”
Explaining just one example of this, Bryan says: “It helps you with your tray scheduling when you’ve got four ovens full of bread rolls and a finite number of trays. You might have to do hot dog rolls or nine-inch rolls, but you might only have enough trays for a thousand rolls at a time.
“If we’ve got to do two or three thousand, to get that glimpse [of that production data]; straight away the boys can say, ‘Right, we’ve got to do this first up.’ They can log into the system, as there’s a computer in the production office, and see what’s there at any time.
“Before, we gave them the final sheet first thing in the morning before they started for the day. But now, we just don’t need to be there.”
If you would like to find out more about how Cybake can help your bakery reduce admin, reduce costs and increase sales, please drop Josalyn Price, our business development manger for Australia and New Zealand, a line at info@cybake.com, or you can get in touch with Josalyn via our contact page.
Chris James is a communications specialist for Cybake and Cybake USA.
