Case Study: SunWest Foods achieves real-time business visibility and optimized plant operations with Aptean Food & Beverage ERP bcFood Edition

SunWest - Customer Case Study

SunWest Foods, California’s second-largest rice and wild rice producer, faced fragmented, disparate systems across three plants that required repetitive manual re-entry (sometimes 6–10 times), slow report generation, inconsistent processes by facility, high safety-stock levels, and frequent errors. To solve this, SunWest selected Aptean and deployed Aptean Food & Beverage ERP bcFood Edition built on Microsoft Dynamics NAV to replace the patchwork of Peachtree, TradeWinds, FileMaker and spreadsheets.

Aptean implemented a company-wide ERP with new servers, VPN connectivity and added EDI for key customers, creating a single source of truth and end-to-end visibility. The results: one-time order entry cut administrative time by about 80% (freeing roughly 30 staff hours per day at peak), reporting that once took weeks or months now runs in minutes, monthly reporting effort dropped from 10–15 staff hours to a few minutes, fewer short mill runs, smarter commodity buy/sell decisions and near-elimination of order errors — all achieved with Aptean’s solution.

SunWest

Jim Errecarte

President and Chief Executive Officer