With the mission of creating the next generation of world-class enterprise solutions, Oak Barrel Software, LLC is targeting Process Manufacturing issues that have been unaddressed by the large software/service leaders. The organization is a food industry technology provider that solves one of the most pressing business issues food manufacturing companies face today: digital data management to meet all of the operational and compliance requirements in this industry. Oak Barrel invented the term “DigiFacturing” ™ to uniquely describe all of its solutions, which include intelligent document conversion and data capture, process management and publishing digital content to address nine categories of needs. Intelligent date management and pre-configured reminders automate information housekeeping to ensure data accuracy, compliance management and ongoing change control. Oak Barrel offers three unique capabilities that currently aren’t available today: real/provable results within 96 hours of licensing/using; an iterative data add/expand/change capability of any data (structured or unstructured) and business intelligence capability (with infused AI) to improve business decisions.
Software that Makes Life Easier
When it comes to products, Oak Barrel Software offers nine specific categories of solutions;
- Supplier Compliance and Risk Management: Collaborative portal-based processes provide an easy way to continuously assess risk and remain in compliance of FSMA, ISO, GSFI and/or other quality/safety certifications;
- Supplier Specific Management: A one-stop single portal combining technical data and documents, ePIF and other information for suppliers, brokers, distributors, co-packers and contract manufacturers;
- Supply Chain Voyance: Risk and compliance processes and transparency across all products to the lowest level of the value chain to meet customer mandates, minimize risks and validate product claims. This includes open end-point web services, document-to- data transformation and automated conformance validation which minimizes the time to collect, validate and publish risk and compliance data at all levels of the value chain;
- Project Catalog and Configurators: A simplified catalog front end to products and guided level-by-level product configurators streamline product or component re-use. This minimizes the innovation and R&D time to vet and deliver similar or redundant products and new (vetted) products, and improves consistency and quality;
- Project Requirements Management: The ability to automate new or product change processes, samples or product information requests and stage gate processes to minimize cycle times, project/identify issues earlier and meet customer service levels;
- Product Informa_on Publishing: Unites multiple product content sources of customer, ingredient and technical data, plus key legal and specification documents to create customer specifications or ePIFS, sales sheets, cost quotes and generate product information for websites, Amazon and Walmart market places;
- Opera_onal Quality Management: This fills the gaps between corporate PLM data and ERP/QMS quality applications, Gold Quality Steps, QAS sheets, SOPs, process flows, HACCP diagrams, magnet checks, lab equipment calibration, chief table product creation comparisons, approvals and publication. By delivering easy access to this wide-spectrum operational data, companies gain improvements in multiple areas like batch-to-batch consistency, minimizing spec batches and audit risks;
- Operational Recipe and Spec Management: A comprehensive solution for uniting multiple recipe and specification content sources to easily spec and create plant/line-specific recipes. It leverages S95 equipment lines and includes general or site/line specific steps so that recipes can be flow-designed or assembled. This step assembly process minimizes variability and improves both quality, consistency and ultimately customer satisfaction;
- Operational Quality Voyance: This is Oak Barrel’s silver bullet for seeing, flagging and minimizing critical quality management issues through multiple processes and technologies, including artificial intelligence. By “DigiFacturing” processes, converting documents to data, accessing PLM, ERP and Operational Quality data and automating comparison spec data, and automa_ng communications, companies can immediately predict, catch and/or minimize bad outcomes. This module facilitates spec corrections, quarantines, correction, out-of-tolerance notifications, and streamlines rapid corrections. It includes automated notifications to R&D, communicates SOP corrections and minimizes the impact of worst-case situations like recalls that can damage brands. Deploying this module can save food manufacturers hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages or lawsuits and is critical for problem recognition, action and risk mitigation.
The Veteran Industry Leader
Rory Granros, Founder and President of Oak Barrel Soware, is an enterprise software industry leader and manufacturing industry veteran. Mr. Granros was a forerunner in introducing a wide variety of technology industry firsts in the food and beverage industry, including new MRP, ERP, Data mart based analytics, PLM, SCM and EAM solutions. He is a progressive thinker with deep technical, product, sales, services and leadership experience across all aspects of process manufacturing.
Mr. Granros always stays on the cutting edge of new technologies to solve real business issues. Therefore, in the fall of 2019 he will reset the bar for food and beverage industry technology solutions when he leads Oak Barrel into the formal launch of his nine-part, multi-tenant, cloud-based solution.
When Data Frustration Inspired Leading- Edge Innovation
When it came to inspiring the leading-edge innovation behind Oak Barrel Software’s solution sets for manufacturers, two words inspired innovation the most; customers’ “DATA FRUSTRATION”. The solution for that data frustration is DigiFacturing: effectively, efficiently collecting, managing and changing data easily/accurately, as needed. This is not a new problem, it’s been a frustration for manufacturers since the first plant was built, and with the rapid growth of the food & beverage industry, the U.S. and Global economy, complex trade agreements, even more complex regulations and compliance requirements – manufacturers’ data frustration problems has grown in size and scope.
Today, as new technologies have emerged supporting digital transformation, Oak Barrel Soware’s solu_on takes another step forward to solve this problem.
The Next Thing
As a company that is always looking to leverage “the next thing” and not stay glued to old technologies and solutions, Oak Barrel Software’s single biggest challenge is not so much a challenge but an opportunity. With each new wave of technology, industry capabilities and infrastructure is developed (for example, multi-tenant cloud hosting, mobile data communications, analytics, artificial intelligence, etc.) The organization challenges itself to take advantage of the best of those capacities and deliver them to its customers as part of its solutions.
Helping to Seamlessly Collaborate and Manage Data
Oak Barrel Software delivers precocious pre-planning for “what’s to come” and rescues customers from data frustration woes without locking them down. For over 20 years, customers have been stuck with enterprise systems that largely managed data (and daily activities) via excel, word and PDF documents. Both small and large food manufacturers are struggling with document control, but Oak Barrel Software’s competitors’ data-oriented solutions are complex, expensive, and difficult to change. They struggle to manage the escalation of documents from disparate sources and on disparate formats.
Oak Barrel also allows food manufacturers to seamlessly collaborate and manage data and documents to eliminate re-entry of data. It also supports internal collaboration, receives and inputs data from multiple systems, and manages the analysis and reporting.
Oak Barrel protects its customers from expensive mistakes like lost knowledge (from one-off, yet critical internal or external data sources), increases product quality controls, reduces compliance risks, and accelerates innovation. This can result in significant bottom and top line growth.
When it comes to the future, Oak Barrel Soware is leveraging the newest digital technologies to deliver to market a unique critically important food industry solution that does not exist today, which is an industry game changer!
