"Case Study: Rich Products Corporation"

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"Infor PLM (Product Lifecycle Management) helps your business maximize profit by optimizing every stage of your product's life, from bids or project request to portfolio management, to product development, to scale up, to ongoing maintenance and retirement."
Source: Infor

Resources Related to Case Study: Rich Products Corporation:

• Rich Products Corporation (Wikipedia)
• Product Lifecycle Management (Wikipedia)

Case Study: Rich Products Corporation

An enterprising company.

Rich Products Corporation (Rich's) has celebrated more than "60 Delicious Years" as a family-owned company. Founded in 1945, Rich's is known around the world as the founder of the non-dairy segment of the frozen food industry and a leading supplier and solutions provider to the food service, in-store bakery, and retail marketplaces. As one of the world's premier family-owned food companies, Rich's posts annual sales exceeding $2.4 billion.

Rich's manufactures and markets quality products including: toppings and icings, breads and rolls, finished desserts and cakes, pizza dough and sweet goods, beverages, Italian specialties, barbeque, seafood and appetizers. In the coming years, through new product development, strategic acquisitions, and a relentless commitment to excellence, Rich's will continue to grow and thrive as a global industry leader.

Setting the strategy.

To continue to drive toward aggressive growth plans, Rich's needs systems to support the processes that enable growth. However, Rich's older IT systems could not interoperate with platforms and applications among departments. This prohibited a single, centralized view of the product development process, limiting collaboration among departments, while adding time and complexity to new product development.

Getting Business specific.

Based on its requirements to integrate and accelerate its product lifecycle management (PLM) process, Rich's selected Infor^TM PLM Optiva® to enable departments to leverage a centralized resource to expedite product introductions, reduce material costs, and improve overall product quality. Specifically, Rich's incorporated Infor PLM Optiva to support research and development, formula management, labeling, and other business critical departments.

"To meet our business and product goals, centralizing all of our product information on Infor PLM was an imperative and will ensure accuracy and timeliness of new product launches," says Anne Schneider, senior business analyst, R&D. "Infor PLM is our real-time innovation engine. It enables us to work seamlessly across multiple departments to create, modify, and deploy new products, while also streamlining the management of existing offerings."

By providing visibility across multiple departments, Infor PLM enhances our insight into product viability early in the R&D process... ANNE SCHNEIDER "
SR. BUSINESS ANALYST-R&D, RICH PRODUCTS CORPORATION

"Requiring centralized control of the R&D process while providing each department with the tools and flexibility that they need to succeed can be a difficult balance. We were able to use Infor PLM Optiva's workflow capabilities to ensure complete visibility without stifling creativity," continues Anne.

Committed to maintaining its reputation for product excellence, Rich's growth strategy is to select product introductions that have a high potential for success rather than rapidly introducing a number of products and hoping that some products take hold. As such, it was critical that Rich's be able to identify which new products in development would have the highest potential rate for success. Just as important, Rich's needed to quickly pinpoint development projects that would not be viable in the marketplace due to excessive ingredient costs, limited market appeal or other success-limiting factors.

Seeing results.

"By providing visibility across multiple departments, Infor PLM enhances our insight into product viability early in the R&D process, enabling us to make informed decisions to continue with development or reallocate resources to focus on new projects that have high potential for success," notes Anne. "Our comprehensive view of research data enables us to increase ROI on product development and accelerate time to market for key offerings."

In addition to expediting product development, Rich's is better able to reduce direct material costs by more effectively collaborating with manufacturing and sourcing. Providing visibility across the entire product lifecycle process enables Rich's to make informed decisions about resource allocation and product launches. Infor PLM Optiva's labeling functionality enables Rich's to automatically leverage existing ingredient formulation information for product labeling. "Utilizing core recipe information for labeling, guidelines and restrictions, and other product development processes provides significant time and cost savings while further assuring product quality," says Anne.

To further support its sales and customer service, product information can be retrieved by both the company's helpline team and marketing associates. The system provides them access to product information that enables the company to give customers and prospects quick, detailed information about Rich Products' offerings.

With Infor PLM, Rich's is better able to reduce direct material costs by more effectively collaborating with manufacturing and sourcing.

Being open to an enterprising future.

Infor PLM is currently deployed at Rich's Buffalo, New York, headquarters and 13 of its production plants. The application is also being extended to recent acquisitions. Currently, more than 100 associates use Infor PLM Optiva. By enhancing its information technology infrastructure and using Infor's solution, Rich's has additional agility to bring new products to market quickly while minimizing ingredient costs-without compromising quality. With increasing success, Rich's is on course to continue to serve up popular new products while meeting its aggressive corporate expansion goals.

About Infor.

Infor delivers business-specific software to enterprising organizations. With experience built in, Infor's solutions enable businesses of all sizes to be more enterprising and adapt to the rapid changes of a global marketplace. With more than 70,000 customers, Infor is changing what businesses expect from an enterprise software provider. For additional information, visit www.infor.com.