Interview with a PlanetOne ERP user (Food Specialize Co., Ltd.)

Khun Sarut Nakharatanakorn
Sales & Marketing Director, Food Specialize Co., Ltd.

The BRID team had the chance to interview a senior executive of Food Specialize Co., Ltd., one of the long-standing users of the PlanetOne ERP system, having gone live in 2014 and continuing to today. In this interview, Khun Sarut kindly joined the BRID team for a friendly chat.

BRID: Could you please introduce yourself, Khun Sarut?

I’m Sarut Nakharatanakorn, Sales & Marketing Director of Food Specialize. I’ve been with this company for about 12 years now.

BRID: What business is Food Specialize Co., Ltd. in?

Our company is a food manufacturer and exporter. Mainly products such as sauces, curry pastes, ready-made curries, and various kinds of ready-made food.

Our company focuses mainly on exports, and the company has grown continuously every year. Today we have sellers of our products in more than 40 countries worldwide.

BRID: What year did you go live?

I started bringing in the ERP system in 2014. At that time we were expanding and were using a semi-manual system,

which made us see the problem that the system we were using did not meet present-day needs —

because of problems with the traceability of various data, or with collecting various data, since the data was kept partly in Excel and partly in documents.

That made it hard to link together and hard to analyse.

So we decided we would bring in an ERP, because we wanted every system to be linked together and easy to trace back.

When we started implementing, the system was considered quite new at the time, and our staff did not yet understand the system as they should,

because most were long-serving staff who had been with us for ten-odd years.

When we started, we began by deciding to communicate with the staff in the team first, that we would bring in an ERP,

and pulled in the relevant units — especially the manager-level group —

to take part in the training and prepare to be super users together.

But it took a while to adapt, and for the system to run normally.

BRID: After you started using PlanetOne ERP, how was it?

The system works well. It makes users’ work easier, and lets us collect data from many users.

We connect the data and centralise it in one place, so everyone can see the same data easily. And because the system tracks users, we can track which user keyed in which data and is responsible for which area — which makes it easy to audit.

BRID: Any advice for those looking for an ERP system?

My advice for those looking for an ERP —

I’d like you to involve all the users, or the various departments that take part, right from choosing the ERP software you’ll use.

Because each software has different pros and cons, and having each user involved means not only that users accept it more easily, but also that users get what they really need.