Customer Success Story Rosina Food Products prepares for future growth with NexTec and Sage X3

Founded over sixty years ago as a small storefront sausage business in Buffalo, New York, Rosina Food Products is now a leading frozen food manufacturer of Italian specialties including meatballs and pasta. Today, you’ll find Rosina’s portfolio of premium food brands in supermarkets and restaurants throughout North America and around the world. Rosina is also an ingredient in many other food manufacturers’ products such as soup, pizza, and lasagna.

The family-owned company is on a rapid growth trajectory. Rosina’s new 180,000 square foot protein facility produces 12,000 pounds an hour, and the company has plans to expand the facility and double its production volume. Rosina is also currently building a 90,000 square foot Distribution Center with approximately 1,500 pallet positions.

In 2020, Rosina reached a point where its QAD ERP system, which dated from the early 1990s, could no longer keep up with its growing manufacturing volumes and the scale of its operations. Rosina selected Sage X3 and NexTec Group to deliver a flexible and scalable foundation for future growth.

“Prior to Sage X3, we had silos of information spread across multiple systems that were poorly integrated,” explains Bryan Wherry, Director of Information Technology, Rosina Food Products. There was also a lot of duplicate data entry and rekeying of information from one system to another, which wasted staff time and efficiency. We needed an ERP system that was going to take us into the future and enable complete corporate data management.”

“Our QAD system was at capacity and wasn’t handling operations very well,” explains Bryan Wherry, Director of Information Technology, Rosina Food Products. “Outside of a few users in Finance, not many people interacted with the system, which limited the opportunity to fully leverage the data.”

“A key business driver for moving to a new ERP was gaining better access to sales information and being able to work with our customers and get quality data about their sales and performance with us,” Wherry says. “It would take a lot of time and effort to compile this data and combine it with syndicated market data to get an accurate picture of where we stood.”

To select a new ERP system, Rosina went through an RFP process that lasted 3-4 months. After evaluating a dozen potential solutions, the company narrowed the field down to three ERP vendors. After completing in-depth demos, they ultimately selected Sage X3 with NexTec Group as their implementation partner.

Key factors in choosing Sage X3 included:

“The Sage X3 platform’s flexibility in integrating with our SQL Server backend was attractive,” says Wherry. “We had developed systems internally and there were no out-of-the-box solutions on the market to replace them, so we knew we were going to have to customize or even build applications to integrate with Sage X3. The ability to do our own customizations was a key selection factor.”

“Finding the right implementation partner was also crucial,” says Wherry. “We needed a Sage X3 consultant that understood our space from a food manufacturing standpoint. NexTec had a wide breadth of food industry knowledge, excellent client references, and the dedicated resources we needed.”

Since implementing Sage X3, Rosina Foods has experienced significant operational improvements:

Streamlined operations – Eliminated duplicate data entry across systems, streamlined business processes across departments, enhanced processing speed for data recording and consumption, and improved plant floor management.

Better data access and analysis – Faster access to sales information and customer performance data, improved integration of corporate, customer, and syndicated market data for enhanced business intelligence and sales forecasting capabilities.

“A huge benefit of Sage X3 is the ability to bring all of our corporate, customer sales, and syndicated market data together for corporate reporting and oversight,” says Wherry. “Getting more people across the company involved in the data has made us more efficient and effective.”

“The data flows both ways,” Wherry adds. “We have syndicated GS1 and product data going out to the market, and the ability to integrate X3 directly to our Syndigo platform is a substantial advantage for us.”

A standout achievement of the implementation was the development of Rosina Production Management (RPM), a custom-built plant floor management system that integrates directly with X3. This touchscreen system manages work orders and tracking records while providing real-time production information.

The company also developed a custom “Product Specs” module within Sage X3 to handle recipe management, replacing the need for a third-party solution and a sales forecasting tool that empowers the sales team with timely and detailed customer and sales data.

Rosina’s deployment of Sage X3 revealed a common challenge around change management.

“A lot of the people didn’t feel that there was a major need to change,” Wherry admits. “They didn’t realize that when you rip out your ERP system, your business processes need to evolve as well.”

“NexTec has been a trusted liaison in working with our departments to make sure they understand the value of Sage X3 in reengineering those business processes to be more efficient,” Wherry adds.

As Rosina continues its growth journey, they’re focused on expanding their use of Sage X3 by:

The company sees NexTec as a long-term strategic partner on this journey.

“NexTec’s consultants understand our business at a deep level,” says Wherry. “They have a good knowledge base of where we are, what we need, and how we operate. We’ve never really been in a situation where we’re looking for updates. They’re really responsive.”

“NexTec’s bench strength sets them apart,” Wherry concludes. “It’s not just the consultants we’re working with week to week. There’s a large team behind them that helps the entire process – developers, support professionals, and so on.”