Woodside Bakeries has been baking bread for families across the Northeast for more than ninety years. What began as a single neighborhood bakery is now a network of four production plants and a direct-store-delivery fleet serving thousands of grocery, convenience and food service customers every day.
Freshness is everything in Woodside’s business. Products are baked, packed and delivered within hours, and each day’s production plan depends on accurate orders from hundreds of routes. As the company grew through acquisitions, an aging ERP system and a patchwork of plant-level tools made that balancing act harder every year. Woodside partnered with Oraya® to move its operations onto a modern, integrated platform built for the pace of fresh food.
Challenges
Woodside’s leadership identified several issues holding the business back:
- A legacy ERP nearing end of support, with heavy customization and little vendor help
- Separate production planning tools at each plant and no shared view of capacity
- Manual reconciliation of route settlements, returns and stale product credits
- Limited visibility into product, customer and route profitability
- Recipe and allergen data maintained in spreadsheets outside the core system
Why Oraya
Woodside wanted a partner that understood both food manufacturing and the realities of direct-store delivery. Oraya brought a team with bakery and consumer products experience, a proven migration approach and a willingness to spend time on the plant floor before designing a single process.
The team also proposed a phased rollout, one plant at a time, so the business could learn from each go-live and never put a morning delivery at risk.
“They took the time to learn how a bakery really runs — early mornings, short shelf life and all. That’s why the new system fits the way we work.”
— Vice President of Operations, Woodside Bakeries
Implementation highlights
- Migration to SAP Cloud ERP Private Edition with a selective data transition that preserved key sales and production history
- Standardized recipe, formula and allergen management inside the core system
- Integrated production planning across all four plants, driven by route-level demand
- Automated route settlement, including returns and stale credits
- Embedded analytics for daily margin and waste reporting
- Plant-by-plant go-lives with no interruption to deliveries
Outcome
Woodside now runs its plants, routes and finance on a single platform. Planners see demand and capacity across the whole network in one place, which has helped the company cut overproduction and waste. Route settlement that once dragged on for days now closes within the week, and finance can see profitability by product, customer and route for the first time.
Just as important, the company has a foundation for what comes next. With clean, consistent data in one system, Woodside is exploring AI-driven demand forecasting to fine-tune daily production — a natural next step for a business where every hour of freshness counts. For a look at where AI is already paying off in the industry, watch our webcast on AI in consumer goods.
