Laguna Hills, CA -- (ReleaseWire) -- 12/14/2006 --Nearly $3 Million in annual revenue is a lot of cheesecakes. Desserts of Distinction of Portland, Oregon, now 28 years in business, “bakes” to order from any of its 19 fillings and 7 crusts in a choice of portion sizes which are shipped in a range of packaging choices to a considerable number of customers, both large and small. The company makes mostly short production runs, between 100 and 150 batches per day. As you would expect, the owners are both master bakers and resourceful business people. They raced through the $2 Million revenue mark with no more in business management tools than Excel spreadsheets for recipes, tracking sales and inventory, and an Access database for managing batches. Now they rely entirely upon BatchMaster Enterprise and are set up to do Lot Tracking at virtually any level of granularity.

Greg Calhoun, second generation owner/operator with his wife, Cathy, explained, “We had reached a point where our tools for managing our business were managing us. It had become too difficult to execute and grow our business without proper tools.” Greg went on to observe that, “For those formulations managed with BatchMaster Enterprise, we’ve captured every detail and significantly improved our accuracy and inventory management.”

BatchMaster Enterprise Offers Superior Formulation and Distribution Facilities Greg and Cathy have already defined 100 recipes and made each of these resident in BatchMaster Enterprise, representing 30% of their business’s SKUs and 80% of the company’s volume. Several of Desserts of Distinctions’ 30 plus employees use BatchMaster Enterprise for Sales Order, Purchase Order, Inventory and Batch Management routinely throughout each work day. Where before, either Greg or Cathy had to do all the planning, now several others can lend a hand with more accuracy and less effort in less time. “Small businesses get an opportunity to get big only if they can be nimble,” notes Greg. “Our needs exceeded what our office-type software tools could do for us. With BatchMaster Enterprise, we established a whole new paradigm. Now we have the planning and management capacity to grow to a $50 Million company in a very few years, which is part of our business plan. There’s no turning back.

The company has better lead times to prepare for new production runs. Next, they can use the Lab and Formulations modules to experiment with new formulas and to extend their product line with new tastes and consistencies. And now that they’ve implemented the Master Production Scheduling (“MPS”) and MRP modules, they’re able to schedule production in advance and place orders for materials weeks to months ahead of time without fear of loss to spoilage or increased costs for holding.

According to Greg, “We raced to $2 Million in annual sales (translates to 2,000 to 4,000 cheesecakes per week) and were filling more and more cells in innumerable spreadsheets. It was a challenge to stay organized. We had started to see our ‘Limits to Growth.’ The only way for us to advance beyond being a ‘small business’ was to implement advanced methodologies and tools.” “BatchMaster Enterprise has all the features we need. And the BatchMaster support team is without peer. They got us up and running fast, and got our people excited about these new features. We can never go back to our old methods. And we can all ‘thank goodness’ for that!”

BatchMaster Software, Inc. has provided advanced ERP solutions for over two decades with more than one thousand five hundred installations worldwide. BatchMaster’s customers can be found in every formula or recipe-based business, including food, beverage, cosmetic, personal care, paint, coating, nutraceutical, pharmaceutical, and specialty chemical industries. Flexible, easy to learn and use, and scalable to grow with a process manufacturing business, BatchMaster is the definitive solution for the challenges facing small to midsize process manufacturers. BatchMaster has more than a hundred technical staff members of highly-qualified software professionals.