The integrated Infor platform helped Ruiz Foods to modernise its operations, especially through the use of scanners, planning tools and data analytics.
According to Infor, this was especially important to help Ruiz Foods navigate meaningful changes in product demand brought on by several years of industry disruptions, including the Covid-19 pandemic.
Ruiz Foods has manufactured and delivered Mexican food since 1964. Today, it has more than 4,000 employees and facilities in California, Texas, and South Carolina. Between its five plants, Ruiz Foods is said to generate more than half a million Infor transactions per day when manufacturing, its burritos, chimichangas, taquitos, enchiladas, tamales, quesadillas, and breakfast burritos.
Ruiz Foods has used a variety of Infor solutions on-premises, including Infor Optiva, M3, Supply Chain Planning, Factory Track, and EPM. In 2022 Ruiz Foods’s data centre hardware needed to be replaced.
Senior vice president Michael Warter said: “It was the strategic technology benefits that gave us the impetus to move. It had become very clear over the past several years that Infor was investing significantly in its cloud offering and that most of its latest innovations were coming out for cloud. In order for us to stay strategically aligned with Infor, we needed to move to the cloud to access the solution’s absolute latest capabilities. The move is a win-win because we are saving a considerable amount of capital, which we’ve been able to redirect to other initiatives, while staying aligned with our technology partner.”
While agreeing that moving to Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage was a good business decision, Ruiz Foods’s leadership team was reluctant to start a huge, and potentially expensive, cloud migration project, especially with the pandemic playing out worldwide. With this in mind, Warter worked with Infor president of products & customer success Soma Somasundaram and Infor partner Doppio Group to devise a plan to transition Ruiz Foods gradually to the cloud instead of moving everything simultaneously. “We were able to find a way to step into the cloud without having to do it all at once as a big bang,” Warter added.
The company started with upgrading its Infor PLM for Process (Optiva) into the cloud, which provided a way for Ruiz Foods to capture raw materials, subcomponents and finished goods. Ruiz Foods was able to determine value drivers in the business by analysing the costs of raw materials and subcomponents for individual finished goods and thereby track product profitability. Ruiz Foods then used these insights to rationalise the SKU (stock-keeping unit) portfolio to weather the emerging and ongoing economic challenges in the food industry.
“What we learned when we started allocating all these costs back through the product cycle is that it changed some of our profitability assumptions,” Warter explained. “That, in turn, changed some of our strategy in terms of where we wanted to make investments. This insight has proven to be valuable to our business.”