C.H. Guenther & Son has enjoyed rapid growth in recent years, adding more factories across the United States, Canada, and Western Europe to support the increasing demand for its products. With each expansion, the volume of certificates of analysis (COAs), suppliers, specifications, and more also grew. Keeping up became a time-consuming and labor-intensive process—plagued by redundancies and mistakes.

CHG needed a solution to work seamlessly with their existing ERP across nearly a dozen plant locations. CHG stored COAs in a SharePoint database, but there was no integration whatsoever with the legacy ERP.

C.H.G. Company Snapshot

San Antonio-based C.H. Guenther & Son is a privately-owned food manufacturer that’s delivered high-quality products and “just baked from scratch” flavor for 170 years. CHG is a leading supplier of value-added grain-based and frozen food products for foodservice clients and select consumer markets. CHG’s portfolio of retail brands includes Pioneer, White Wings, Sun-Bird, and Cuisine Adventures. Their customers are leaders in the foodservice, consumer, and restaurant markets.

Founded in Texas in 1851 by German immigrant Carl Hilmar “C.H.” Guenther, the global company employs more than 3,000 people in more than two dozen manufacturing locations scattered across the globe.

COA challenges

With so many different facilities, supplier relationships, and employees, the process of reviewing paperwork was not only redundant, but risked human error.

“A COA would come in, preceding the shipment or accompanying it, and immediately somebody would grab the COA and compare it against what’s reflected in the specification sheet. The problem is: humans make mistakes. We had customers who required double verification that the COA matched the specs, so we would have one technician performing this validation, followed by a second person doing the same thing. We wanted a better, easier, more efficient way to do it,” explains Juan De Leon, Senior Global Director of Food Safety and Quality Assurance.

CHG also wanted a solution that would work seamlessly with SAP, their existing ERP, and across nearly a dozen plant locations. CHG used to store COAs in a SharePoint database but there was no integration whatsoever with SAP.

Connected solutions

TraceGains collaborated with CHG to connect their Supplier Compliance and Supplier Management with SAP using TraceGains’ standardized API suite. Now they have a seamless interface that starts with TraceGains comparing COAs with specifications and then telling SAP which lots are out-of-spec and on hold for resolution. Plant team members can work more efficiently as they don’t spend time manually determining which ingredients are out-of-spec.

This integration has increased visibility all the way from the quality department onto the plant floor, allowing the company to more easily ensure their high quality standards.