Spice World Updates Its Technology to Ensure Growth

After partnering with a PE firm in 2018, Spice World, a leading spice manufacturer, decides to replace its aging AS/400 system with a cloud ERP supported by a strong implementation partner.

For decades, Spice World, Inc. has been responsible for those glass jars of garlic that are in about 99% of refrigerators nationwide. Based in Orlando, Fla., the company sells multiple versions of that product, but is primarily focused on selling bulk garlic and ginger in nets and 5-, 10- and 30-pound boxes.

Spice World was founded in 1949 by Andrew Caneza who started out buying garlic from area farmers, loading it into the trunk of his car and selling the goods to grocery stores. He then began to separate the garlic into cloves, grate it and package it into glass bottles.

From these simple beginnings, the operation grew into a leading supplier of garlic and other spices under the iconic Spice World brand. Today, the company provides retailers with fresh, innovative, and on-trend ingredients and spices. It has multiple production facilities and more than 200 grocery chains, club stores and distributors who sell its fresh, semi-processed and processed garlic, ginger and shallots.

A Journey Down the ERP Path

In 2018, private equity (PE) firm Palladium Equity Partners, LLC, partnered with the Spice World management team with the goal of expanding the latter’s market. As part of the deal, David Owens, Director of IT, came onboard to help modernize the company’s IT solutions.

“Our partnership with PE started our journey down the enterprise resource planning (ERP) path,” said Owens.

At the time, Spice World was using an AS/400 system that had been in place since 1993. Twenty-five years old when the deal with Palladium was signed, the system frequently broke down (both its hardware and software), forcing the company to seek out AS/400 experts for help and/or scour eBay for spare parts.

“We knew we needed to get on to a more modern solution before the AS/400 became completely untenable for us,” said Owens.

Inventory management was particularly challenging with the aging system, which required Excel spreadsheets and manual intervention.

“Once a month, we had to do a physical inventory count,” Owens explained, “where we walked the warehouses at all of our different locations, collected reports from our third-party storage facilities, and then pulled all the inventory together to get an understanding of what was on hand and what needed to be ordered.”

The Spice World-PE partnership also triggered a rethinking of their technology approach. Most employees had a good idea of how the garlic business worked since they had spent their entire lives in the business, but to do accurate projections required a more standardized process.

“Palladium wanted to see the performance of the organization in a more rapid, data-driven model,” said Owens. “AS/400 simply couldn’t deliver that for them.”

The Right Cloud ERP & the Right Business Services Partner

Collaborating with a third-party consultant, Spice World’s management team went through a thorough, 6-month ERP evaluation process before selecting NetSuite and Myers-Holum, Inc. as its implementation partner. The final selection came down to Microsoft Dynamics and NetSuite, and that the latter won out based on demonstrations of how it would work in real-world settings, according to Owens.

“With Myers-Holum, we saw demonstrated expertise and an understanding how manufacturing works,” Owens said. “They came in and quickly deciphered how we were running our operations and identified the best-practice gains we’d get out of using a cloud ERP. We knew we had a partner that could help us successfully implement NetSuite.”

“With Myers-Holum, we saw demonstrated expertise and an understanding how manufacturing works,” Owens said. “They came in and quickly deciphered how we were running our operations and identified the best-practice gains we’d get out of using a cloud ERP. We knew we had a partner that could help us successfully implement NetSuite.”

Myers-Holum had the opportunity to prove itself when Spice World kicked off its implementation phase. As part of the process, Myers-Holum developed a custom integration with a food manufacturing-focused production and warehouse management system (WMS).

Challenges Transitioning to New ERP

Implementing the ERP project was not without its challenges. Gathering complete requirements and finding the optimal solutions for those requirements took a concerted effort on the part of Spice World and Myers-Holum working in tandem across departments.

Because this was an opportunity to optimize existing processes, everyone who had a stake in these processes needed to weigh in. Internally Spice World spent time meticulously documenting their existing and future processes that they then provided to Myers-Holum. Myers-Holum then leveraged their expertise to guide the final solution. This became an iterative process as the initial project scope expanded into a larger, more comprehensive plan and solution that met more of the company’s needs and stakeholders’ requirements. This led to time and budget overruns due to the complex nature of the system and requirements. Extra expenses were incurred due to the delays and additional onsite visits were necessary.

The project was initiated in the shadow of COVID prior to a vaccine being available and during the busiest months for Spice World as a business so overall coordination, staff buy-in and establishing new streamlined processes were extremely challenging.

After the first successful go-live, Myers-Holum continued to support Spice World and moved certain features and functionality to a phase II Go-Live. Spice World received support from NetSuite Advanced Customer Support and Myers-Holum to ensure the system runs smoothly.

Today, Spice World can track its inventory from the time is arrives at a facility, as it goes through processing/picking/packing/storage, and as inventory ships out the door. Because Spice World operates in the highly regulated food industry, the system also includes robust lot tracking and traceability.

“Now we have a second-by-second understanding of what's happening from both the warehouse management and production management side of our business,” said Owens. “Previously, if a customer wanted to know where a shipment was or how soon it would be shipping, it would take a bunch of phone calls to track people down to get those answers.”

“Now we have a second-by-second understanding of what's happening from both the warehouse management and production management side of our business,” said Owens.

Ready for the Harvest

The NetSuite solution implemented by Myers-Holum covers critical aspects Spice World’s business needs. First is the grower management portion with its custom pricing functionality, grower- (vendor-) specific records and grower contract records. The other half of this solution covers the tracking of the farms, land/plots, etc. This also includes projections—estimates of growth—and other important pieces of field data. In addition, the integrations with Spice World’s work management system plays an important part in facilitating Spice World using NetSuite in a multiple output environment (production). Myers-Holum created customizations specifically for transaction approvals, customer pricing structure, order entry and delivery routing.

Spice World has a dashboard that sales and customer service representatives use to quickly pull up orders based on data updated in near real-time. With the click of a mouse, they know if that specific shipment was fulfilled and shipped. They no longer need to tell customers that they will “call them back in 30 minutes” with an answer.

With NetSuite in place and Myers-Holum delivering ongoing customizations, Spice World tackles its busy harvest seasons using a modern, unified enterprise platform.

With NetSuite in place and Myers-Holum delivering ongoing customizations, Spice World tackles its busy harvest seasons using a modern, unified enterprise platform.

“We targeted our implementation timing based on getting the system in and stabilized before that first harvest which drove some of our initial urgency,” said Owens. “In our business, you can’t just select a random ‘go-live’ month and then bump it up a month or two if you run into challenges, but you also don't want to rush because the risk of doing so is too great. That was not a risk that we were willing to take.”

Spice World is now leveraging NetSuite technology with its leading practices in agriculture. This has resulted in significant cost savings, improved inventory accuracy, better materials requirements planning (MRP) and more accurate production scheduling.