TGI Company News

Founded in 1975 and headquartered in Richfield, Wisconsin, DCI Cheese Company (DCI) is the leading supplier of high-quality, value-added specialty cheese. DCI’s unique business model has evolved to comprise a portfolio of leading company-owned or exclusively managed brands, dedicated supplier partnerships, and a full service consolidation warehousing program. The company’s brands include: Black Diamond, Salemville, Organic Creamery, Meza, Goldy’s, Joan of Arc, County Line, and King’s Choice among others.

Over the past year DCI has grown rapidly through several acquisitions. Managing these acquisitions effectively required a fully-integrated enterprise resource planning system that was capable of managing the functionality requirements of four existing legacy systems. According to DCI’s Chief Financial Officer Tim Preuninger, “We needed a software system that allowed us to effectively manage our multiple businesses. One of those acquisitions was a spin-off of a much larger food processing company, so time was of the essence to effectively implement a software package that provided us the financial reporting and operational management capabilities that we required.”

In addition to the technical challenges involved with managing four separate entities operating on four different systems, DCI faced additional supply chain challenges. Preuninger states, “As we continue to grow, it’s becoming more critical that we identify and use key information to help us to quickly and accurately complete our financial reporting needs as well as achieve operational excellence within our supply chain. We also wanted to select a user-friendly software package that provided a certain level of flexibility to allow us to tailor it to our needs.”

Preuninger and his team selected Enterprise 21 ERP software from TGI International due to the company’s extensive experience with the cheese industry. In addition to the multi-company support required by DCI, Enterprise 21 also met a wide range of functionality requirements needed to manage food and beverage products; from market-based pricing to complete lot control and reporting, Enterprise 21 was a leader amongst the packages DCI reviewed. “We found that Enterprise 21 offered superior production planning support and data extract capabilities. We also found Enterprise 21 to be more user-friendly than most packages we evaluated, and the quality of technical support has been excellent.”

When asked about the implementation process thus far, it is clear that DCI and TGI create a solid technical partnership. Preuninger states, “Once we are fully operational on Enterprise 21, we expect to achieve substantial operational efficiency improvements through better production planning, less downtime due to inefficiency and changeover, and better raw material inventory management, all of which should lower cost and improve customer service. Additionally, we expect to see our period-end closing process become more efficient, allowing us the ability to close our financial statements faster and more accurately as well as provide our financial group more time to drive our business results.”

The implementation of Enterprise 21 is being rolled out to DCI’s various companies in a well planned, controlled manner. Overall both DCI and TGI are happy with the implementation process and rate of user adoption. DCI proclaims the project to be an ongoing success and states, “Our systems conversions so far have been nearly seamless and trouble-free. We were able to convert the spin-off of the much larger company within six months of acquisition, and the conversion was seamless to the customer. We are now able to get faster and more accurate access to our business data.”