SYSPRO Customer Wins Manufacturing 100 Award

COSTA MESA, Calif. – April 27, 2009 – SYSPRO, a leading, worldwide provider of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, today announced that SYSPRO ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) customer, Chocolate Potpourri, has been honored by Managing Automation Media with a Progressive Manufacturing 100 Award. Chocolate Potpourri, a Chicago-area based manufacturer of chocolate confections, is being cited for “Data & Integration Mastery,” one of eight core award categories.

Utilizing SYSPRO ERP Software, Chocolate Potpourri achieves operational excellence by leveraging new efficiencies from SYSPRO’s integrated data management and shipping capabilities. Chocolate Potpourri also leverages the SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) capabilities housed within SYSPRO’s e.net solution to facilitate orders placed on the chocolate maker’s website. Via SYSPRO, these customized orders are placed, documented, channeled to production (same day), shipped and fully traceable – all via the Internet.

“We are in a specialty food sector that has been hit hard by both the recession and the regulations tied to ingredient traceability,” explains Richard Gordon, CEO of Chocolate Potpourri. “SYSPRO is our trusted partner – both on helping us to find new cost efficiencies and in helping us to meet compliancies as they occur. Their serial and lot traceability features, combined with their completely integrated order management system, are superb.”

The Progressive Manufacturing 100 Awards were selected by a panel of 15 judges, consisting of past winners, industry analysts, university professors, trade association members the Managing Automation magazine team. Winners will be recognized in June at the Progressive Manufacturing Summit in Sarasota, Florida.

The food manufacturing sector is one of four core SYSPRO verticals where SYSPRO boasts industry specific differential functionality, in-depth experience and a large satisfied customer base. Some of the key features of SYSPRO’s food vertical solution are:

Vertical-specific Financial Reporting
Packaged Food Industry Metrics
Food Engineering Change Control
Serial and Lot Traceability
Ingredient Quotation/Estimating
Quality Tracking
And more than 10 additional food industry-related feature
According to Joey Benadretti, SYSPRO USA President, “Chocolate Potpourri exemplifies how a relatively small manufacturer can utilize technology to initiate lean practices and create efficiencies that enable it to be competitive with the largest players in the industry.”

SYSPRO’s more thoughtful approach to adopting new technology, such as web services and SOA platforms, also reflects the desires of its buyers who are driven by business needs and not by the latest headlines. This exemplifies SYSPRO’s ongoing strategy of helping to simplify the success of its customers. SYSPRO calls its buyer landscape “PragmaVision,”™ consisting of pragmatic, visionary ERP executives that are driven by a desire for smart, but aggressive market growth.

About Managing Automation Media
Managing Automation Media, a division of Thomas Publishing Company, LLC, provides a complete set of decision-support informational tools for executives and technology decision-makers at progressive manufacturers — companies that are using information and automation technologies to transform their businesses and create a sustainable competitive advantage. In North America with Managing Automation, and now also in EMEA with Manufacturing Executive, they deliver access to the most influential decision makers in manufacturing. Additional information can be found at managingautomationmedia.com.

About SYSPRO
Since its inception in 1978, SYSPRO has been delivering state-of-the-art business solutions to some of the world's leading companies. As a global leader in the production of world-class ERP software, the company now caters to the specialized needs of 14,000 licensed companies in more than 60 countries worldwide. SYSPRO is marketed globally through regional territory distribution centers and a global reseller network in the US, Canada, Africa, Asia Pacific, Australia and the UK.

SYSPRO is a fully integrated business software solution that provides complete control over the planning and management of all facets of business including accounting, manufacturing and distribution operations in a variety of industries.