UK pet food manufacturer Butcher's Pet Care is replacing its back-office IT systems to provide more efficient management of business operations and greater visibility of its manufacturing and supply chain processes.

The company is updating its 10-year-old legacy systems with enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems software from supplier IFS, replacing antiquated reporting processes.

'Basically, we wanted a manufacturing system to help us with our forecasting, MRP [manufacturing requirement planning] and capacity planning, particularly as we are growing in Europe more now and have many more suppliers,' said Jeff Martins, Butchers financial controller and project manager.

Martins says integration will be the key benefit of the new system, which is expected to go live in April, as well as allowing the company to move away from bespoke systems that require a lot of specialised maintenance.

'At the moment, we basically have a stock, sales and ledger system. Everything else is done on nine or ten separate systems, that go together to get all the data we have at the moment,' he said.

'That's all going to be replaced by one system. Going forward, we should have a much more accurate forecasting, production and capacity planning system in terms of stock levels and customer satisfaction that will enable us to start using the factory to the best of its capabilities.'