Reading Bakery Systems: Snacking on Added Revenue

Reading Bakery Systems, a company that designs and builds processing lines for snack products, was facing several challenges. The company was relying on home-grown programs that were unable to provide the information and control needed for effective operation and growth. The company's old business system lacked the necessary functionalities to run the business, leading to the development of their own procedures and programs to address these deficiencies. The new system needed to include scheduling functionality capable of tracking complex production jobs, as well as multi-job projects, keeping all activities coordinated and properly scheduled. Costing and financial management also needed to recognize both individual jobs and entire projects for proper control and accounting. Given the need to engineer, build and test lines, planning and scheduling were also critically important requirements. Reading needed a fully indented bill of material (BOM) as part of an integrated CAD and ERP system. Moreover, when scheduling and releasing jobs and sub-jobs to production, Reading wanted to flatten the BOMs. This challenging combination of requirements would all need to be a part of the system Reading ultimately chose.

Reading Bakery Systems is a company that designs and builds processing lines for snack products such as cookies, crackers, fabricated potato chips, pretzels and bread snack products. The company is comprised of two divisions, Reading Pretzel & Snack and T.L. Green Biscuit and Cracker. Reading Pretzel & Snack is the undisputed leader worldwide for pretzel production systems, with more than 200 installations worldwide. T.L. Green Biscuit and Cracker has been delivering performance and reliability to producers of biscuits, crackers, sheeted snacks and other baked products for over 110 years, in over 500 installations worldwide. With both Reading Pretzel & Snack and T.L. Green Biscuit and Cracker, Reading now offers a variety of processing lines capable of producing a virtually limitless range of snack products. The majority of Reading equipment is manufactured at the company’s main plant in Robesonia, Pennsylvania. The company also owns a parts-manufacturing plant in Indianapolis, Indiana.