Organic Beauty Line Grows with SAP Business One
Quick Facts
- Name: Green Line
- Location: Hazlet, NJ
- Industry: Cosmetics; Pharmaceuticals
- Products: Botanicals, Essential Extracts
- Website: greenlineingredients.com
- System: SAP Business One ERP, Scheduling Production Software
Green Line is dedicated to supplying superior, quality ingredients developed by formulators for formulators to meet the natural customer’s ongoing performance and marketing needs. Green Line is happy to offer innovative active ingredients,
high-performance emulsifiers, natural antioxidants, and multifunctional ingredients along with their fully customizable botanical extracts platform. We take pride in providing rapid turnaround times, responsive customer support, and, most importantly, our dedication to sustainable sourcing.
As a cosmetics manufacturer with a focus on botanicals and natural extracts, the company was founded in 2012 and is an up-and-coming producer of all-natural beauty and personal care products. Ingredients for their extensive product lines and features are extracted from predominantly plant sources and are processed using green chemistry with no petroleum-based products. Green Line’s goal is to provide superior quality, cost-effective, natural ingredients that include customizable botanical extracts, functionals, and actives.
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Unscalable Disjointed Business Systems Required an Upgrade
Green Line maintains complex recipes and ingredient management, juggling multiple systems for accounting and inventory/production. Their botanical extracts contain many ingredients and unique extraction processes. Manual consolidation proved unscalable for their rapidly growing business. Their previous system had thousands of different items with documentation that needed to be managed, all by hand. The company does a lot of manufacturing and testing in small batches. While there was a need to automate processes, better manage products and inventory, and communicate with customers in real-time, they also required a flexible system customized to fit their needs.
Green Line needed production scheduling help and considered several business management solutions, including NetSuite, for life sciences. However, most of these solutions were not customizable and therefore weren’t a good fit. After evaluating multiple ERP solutions, they discovered and ultimately selected SAP Business One. Green Line wanted something that had been around for a while and had verifiable results in their search. SAP Business One provided that proof and met their customization needs. Green Line contacted Softengine for a solution to their problems. None of the other solutions offered the efficiency and consistency that Softengine did.
Thousands of Spreadsheets Disappear Through Automation
Before the SAP Business One implementation, Green Line managed production with documents by hand, and each of these extracts has 6 – 8 different supporting documents in Excel. In total, they were thousands of spreadsheets associated with these products. Implementing SAP quality assurance software automated many of these tasks and freed up time that employees spent doing these tasks.
Logistics scheduling also opened up a lot of possibilities for Green Line and solved their consistency problem. Having the schedule available at a glance for weekly, daily, or even hourly views significantly improved their manual system. The material requirements planning (MRP) module substantially improved their manufacturing processes, which previously were virtually impossible to prepare for and caused many delays in order fulfillment before the SAP Business One implementation.
The creation of thousands of products on a small scale was difficult for the team to order. Before learning about SAP, the company would run out of product ingredients and inform the customer they could not fulfill the order. Now that roadblock has been eliminated with inventory completely managed by Softengine Scheduling Production Software.
Complete Transparency in Realtime with Easy-to-Understand Dashboards
Now Green Line can review all processes, from sales to production to distribution, with their supply chain’s full transparency. They also see all financial information related to their customers and orders from a single platform. They created a system for better organization that matched SAP’s framework perfectly. Real-time reporting is more robust, with information shared both internally and externally with customers and organizational departments.
The endless manual consolidation has been condensed, and data is now safely stored in the database, readily accessible with instant updates. Directly production is connected all into one system with sales and quality. Real-time visibility from a quality perspective has been a considerable improvement since Quality Assurance has been improved and is better managed with the new system. Automation put Green Line ahead of the game, and they saw an immediate increase in sales and revenue. Other, more strategic tasks were soon taking up the time saved by automation, allowing Green Line to continue on a path of rapid growth. The built-in dashboards with SAP HANA allow for customization and group the most critical tasks, leaving the lesser ones for review later. They also keep non-essential items out of view to improve speed and convenience. Now everyone can view necessary reports in real-time and communicate any changes immediately.