Business success stories: OBE Organic
Managing Director & General Manager – Commercial
Dalene Wray & Nerida Connors
Location
Fortitude Valley, Queensland
Industry
Food & beverage: organic beef production
OBE Organic are producers of the world’s best organic beef. The business began in the 1990s as Australia’s first and only premium organic meat exporter, dedicated to producing high-quality organic beef. The business was founded on century-old traditions of raising cattle the way nature intended, on organic native pastures, where cattle roam freely across natural organic plains.
The business is owned and run by family farmers who have chosen organic livestock production as a way of life. A collective desire to produce the best possible organic beef led these pioneering families to come together to establish OBE Organic.
Dalene Wray, OBE Organic group’s Managing Director, is the company’s longest-serving employee and her family is a major producer for OBE Organic. Nerida Connors is the General Manager of Commercial at OBE Organic and has extensive experience in the business of Beef Processing.
Why did OBE Organic choose the JCurve ERP edition of NetSuite?
OBE Organic was becoming weighed down with countless spreadsheets to track inventory and was outgrowing MYOB for its financials. The team needed a consolidated system to reduce the manual workload and bring all their data together.
OBE Organic evaluated several different systems within the meat industry. JCurve ERP, the exclusive SME edition of NetSuite available in the ANZ region, stood out due to its support of meat-processing needs including production dates, multiple units of measure (such as cartons, kilos and pounds), batch tracking, serialisation, and more.
Nerida explains, “JCurve ERP offers serialisation and dual unit of measure, which was important when choosing an ERP system for our business. There’s plenty of other ERP systems in the market, but they generally only go with a single unit of measure.”
OBE Organic also wanted to consolidate and centrally locate its data, providing a platform that would be more efficient for everyone to use.
Nerida elaborates, “JCurve ERP allows us to hold a lot of information –against customer cards as well as at the transaction level. It’s all in one place, and you don’t have to go looking for the information, you can easily find it. Once you understand the system, it’s also very user friendly.”
“JCurve ERP is so flexible and user friendly that you can pretty much set up a checklist for anything.”
Beefing up business success
Since implementing JCurve ERP, OBE Organic has transitioned to paperless operations. With a cloud-based platform accessible from anywhere and at any time, the company has also been able to support employees needing to work from home seamlessly. The user-friendly interface further supports remote operations.
Nerida explains, “We can go into any invoice and see the original document inside JCurve. Everything is within the one system, and we are now paperless. This is a major benefit that we’ve achieved from using JCurve ERP.”
The CRM functionality of JCurve ERP has allowed the company to backfill data on existing customers. Historical data population has helped create a clear view of how leads and prospects were initiated and then converted into customers. Gaining this more detailed view of the buying cycle allows OBE Organic to hone-in on the right leads moving forward.
Clear visibility across cloud-based operations
Real-time visibility of data gives OBE Organic management and finance staff the ability to access vital information at the click of a button. Access to information at the fingertips has enabled OBE Organic to improve its auditing process and retrieve the necessary data as required during an audit.
Dalene explains, “It’s all in the cloud, it’s paperless, which is very important when we want to retrieve information in a timely manner. Being an organic-certified meat producer, we get audited often and need to have information at our fingertips. During audits, we can quickly prove what we need to as all the data is located in one ERP system.”
Nerida adds, “When we are audited an auditor will want to come in and prove that the carton of meat that we sent out came from a farm that was certified organic. For every audit that we do in our business, JCurve ERP will have an audit checklist, and we can then link all the documentation to those audits.”
“JCurve ERP lets us set up helpful reminders, for example, where the sales team set up with schedules for repricing. As the MD I have a number of reminders set up to ensure important deadlines are not missed.”
When it comes to monitoring business performance, dashboards are key to helping OBE Organic understand to see and drill-down on vital information at a glance. Information is power, and the OBE Organic team now have this power right at their fingertips.
Dalene notes, “One thing we love about JCurve ERP is our dashboards and reminders. We have different dashboards for different people in the business tailored to their role and the data they need to see. The dashboards are quite powerful to be able to look at trends and how your tracking to budget without drilling down on multiple different reports.”
Keeping quality and efficiency high
Upholding high-quality standards has always been paramount for OBE Organic. JCurve ERP helps the company efficiently manage non-conformances, where a product fails to meet inspection or specification standards. OBE Organic tracks every non-conformance, as it happens, using cases and links every interaction or conversation back to the non-conformance case for full traceability and quality assurance.
“As we are in the food business, we need to have a very robust non-conformance reporting system. We go through our non-conformances in our team meetings every week. It’s very powerful because typically we don’t see the same mistake twice.” explains Dalene.
To drive efficiency even further, the business has also set up industry-specific software integrations with JCurve ERP across logistics, payment gateways and interactions with processors and producers. Seamlessly interacting with the third-party software of our processing partners is integral to the business.
The exclusive SME edition of NetSuite, JCurve ERP, has already helped OBE Organic gain real-time visibility across the business, gather new insights about its customers’ buying cycles, and uphold the highest quality standards – efficiently and confidently. Going forward, the team at OBE Organic plans to continue refining operations and exploring further opportunities to maximise their investment in the cloud ERP system.
Outcomes
Real-time visibility over all operational and financial data
Robust non-conformance to support food production quality
Paperless, cloud-based operations providing anywhere, anytime access
Serialisation and dual unit of measure specific to meat producers
Full traceability and auditing to support organic certification
Business guide
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One cloud-based system
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JCurve Solutions (ASX: JCS) is NetSuite’s leading 5-Star partner globally by number of customers, and the exclusive provider of the small business edition of NetSuite, JCurve ERP. JCS has completed over 600 successful cloud ERP implementations.
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