West Coast Reduction Ltd. Improves Supply Chain Visibility, Enables Mobile Fleet Management, and Automates Administrative Processes
 
 

West Coast Reduction Ltd. Improves Supply Chain Visibility, Enables Mobile Fleet Management, and Automates Administrative Processes

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West Coast Reduction Ltd., a Vancouver-based, family-owned and operated business, is the largest independent renderer in Western Canada. The company provides a necessary service to farms; feedlots; restaurants; butcher shops; super markets; and processors of beef, pork, poultry, and fish products intended for human consumption. This service includes the regular pick-up and transfer of meat, fish, and poultry byproducts to rendering plants, where they are processed into protein-feed ingredients and fats and oils used for the oleo chemical industry.

West Coast Reduction conducts rendering operations from facilities in Saskatoon, Edmonton, Calgary, Lethbridge, Vancouver, and Nanaimo. Rendering, a recycling process which involves converting raw materials into useful finished products, requires each of the company’s plants to comply with local, provincial, and federal health, safety, and environmental standards. The company achieves quality assurance and adherence to all applicable laws through the universal implementation of a customized quality assurance program.

West Coast Reduction is constantly looking for ways to leverage technology to streamline its business and make it run more cost effectively. The company continuously enhances its enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to improve its competitive advantage, reduce costs, and automate key business processes. A customer of Oracle’s JD Edwards solutions since 1996, the company recently upgraded to version 9.0 and implemented Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and Oracle Business Intelligence Publisher to automate company processes, reduce capital expenditure, and grow its bottom line across each of its plant locations.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from West Coast Reduction Ltd.

  • “With Oracle, we have a partner that provides great technology and will continue to meet our needs well into the future.” – Brian Brinkac, Chief Information Officer, West Coast Reduction Ltd.

  • Leverage technology to “get fit” by improving operational efficiency and reducing costs across all the organization’s internal and customer-facing departments
  • Enable fleet of 140 trucks to instantly process and pick up orders from farms, supermarkets, restaurants, and other customers and immediately share data with headquarters, ensuring all trucks are utilized to their full capacity
  • Streamline and automate business processes, from the collection of animal byproducts, to payment, to reduce administrative costs
  • Reduce rekeying and reworking data to more easily track products and activities and meet all regulatory and reporting requirements for the rendering industry
  • Enable controlled and strategic financial data sharing to specified internal teams to improve business decision-making
  • Transfer knowledge of continuous improvements in systems and business processes to employees

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Enabled 140 trucks and their drivers to automatically manage customer pick-ups and enter order data through a mobile device for invoice processing
  • Used Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition to manage truckloads more effectively, ensuring each truck deployed returns at least 80% full of raw materials, up from an average of 60%—improving the return on investment in the company’s fleet
  • Enabled the company to redeploy trucks to other locations when they are underutilized, and reduced costs by not buying additional trucks that are not needed
  • Reduced capital expenditure and increased yields for individual plants by improving reporting and identifying inefficiencies
  • Improved route planning for pick-ups of animal byproducts, reducing the number of calls to request service and increasing customer satisfaction
  • Reduced the number of overdue work orders and improved overall asset management through the development of customized dashboards for fleet and factory supervisors, enabling a more proactive approach to equipment maintenance
  • Enabled two employees to manage payroll for more than 450 staff with Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Payroll
  • Condensed time spent compiling monthly financial reports from 15 days to just 2 with Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Financials
  • Designed a comprehensive set of business intelligence (BI) dashboards to share relevant financial data at various staff levels to improve performance across the company
  • Improved organizational consistency and efficiency by employing and following standardized processes
  • Reduced administrative headcount by automating processes, like payments from farms and other meat byproduct producers
  • Increased transparency in reporting and eased regulatory compliance by leveraging the Oracle JD Edwards solution and tools to track activities and determine the source for each load of animal byproducts
  • Implemented Oracle User Productivity Kit to provide knowledge transfer and continuous access to training materials for employees

Why Oracle

Back in 1996, to replace its disparate systems, West Cost Reduction was able to bring all its technological processes under Oracle’s JD Edwards solution. Over the last 16 years, the software has enabled the company to adapt and grow with the industry without needing to buy additional technology solutions. Because of the flexibility and ongoing return on investment the application suite offered, the company chose to continue its relationship with Oracle by upgrading to the latest version of the software and adding additional business intelligence components to further automate processes and enhance visibility for stronger decision-making capabilities. 

“We continue to go with Oracle because the company brings a huge value to the technology side of our business. Over the last 16 years, Oracle has consistently met our business needs. The technology is as state of the art today as it was when we first selected it,” said Brian Brinkac, chief information officer, West Coast Reduction Ltd.

Implementation Process

West Cost Reduction chose to upgrade from JD Edwards EnterpriseOne version 8.12 to 9.0, as it wanted to take advantage of some of the mobility functionality offered in the latest release. While the average upgrade time for this release is 90 days, the company was able to complete the implementation in-house in fewer than 30 days.