Challenge
Orca Specialty Foods depended on a legacy software system, along with hand-written records and Excel, to capture data in their processing plant. The digital system wasn’t always used in real-time, resulting in significant delays in production reporting.
Most accounting and ERP software cannot deal with the dynamic and complex costing in seafood manufacturing, since fish prices and yields can fluctuate depending on fish quality and size. Most accounting and manufacturing software use only standardized costing for the bill of materials.
One added complexity for Orca Specialty Foods was that their inventory—which is partly stored in third-party cold storages—includes raw material and finished products. The quantities and values of these inventories needed to be tracked for month-end financial reporting.
Solution
Orca Specialty Foods introduced Tally to ensure real-time tracking of their inventory, production and costing. QR-coded labels and scanners were introduced to trace all totes and pallets in and out of the inventory, and into production orders and shipments. Prices and yields are tracked in real-time, meaning the raw material cost of each shipment is automatically calculated by the Tally software.
Orca Specialty Foods also required a custom algorithm to create a blended or average cost for each type of raw material in inventory, such as head-and-gutted 6-9 lbs sockeye salmon. Since there could be several lots at different fish prices, the algorithm creates an average cost, weighted by the quantity of each fish lot. As raw material is received and removed from the inventory, the average cost of the raw material item automatically updates, creating a dynamic, real-time costing model.
Tally is also seamlessly integrated into Orca’s accounting software. Purchase Orders are generated in the accounting system and sent automatically to Tally. Master data of product items (SKUs), suppliers and customers are also synced between the software.
