1. ERP Implementation - Howling Cow
Saurabh Vasudeva Shetty
sshetty4@ncsu.edu
480-329-7399

2. Howling Cow Overview
• Howling Cow was founded in 1968 and is based in Raleigh, NC
• It comes under purview of NC State University
• Annual revenue is approximately $ 2 Million
• Products are Milk, Ice Cream and Ice Cream Mix
• Owns a farm which supplies raw milk to the plant

3. Problem
• Legacy system was paper based for all plant operations
• Lack of traceability of items entering and exiting the supply chain
• Monthly billing and FDA required reports involved considerable effort
• Lack of real time inventory information

4. Solution
• Convert existing paper system to a computer based system
• Front end of system is in MS Excel and the backend is a MS Access
Database
• Extensive use of VBA scripting and SQL
• Capturing all of Howling Cow’s supply chain data

5. Project Timeline
Building ERP
System
Testing and
Validation
Implementation
Jun 2015 – Aug 2015 Aug 2015 – Sep 2015 Sep 2015 - Present

6. ERP System Modules
• Delivery
• Production
• Inventory

7. Inventory
Production DeliveryFarm
Process Flow Diagram – Howling Cow
Customer
Raw
Milk
Finished
Product

8. Delivery Module
• The delivery ticketing system is in MS Excel and uses User Forms
for data entry.
• Each delivery ticket pulls items out of inventory with production lot #
• Sales and Inventory databases are updated

9. Production Module
• Data from each production run is captured using an MS Excel
application
• Lot numbers of ingredients used are logged for easy traceability in
the event of a recall
• Production and inventory databases are updated

10. Inventory Module
• The inventory module records all the material that enters Howling
Cow
• Inventory data is used to get ingredient lot # data for production runs
• The inventory database gets updated

11. Problems Encountered
• Motivating current employees to shift from legacy system to new
system
• Driver and Production team training
• Ensuring the ERP system works error free after I graduate

12. Results
• Real-time inventory information available
• Auto-population of FDA mandated reports
• Created BI reports for billing and demand forecasting
• Direct savings of 50 man hours per month