Dan Farber: Brendan thanks for joining me.
Brendan O'Malley: It's a pleasure to be here Dan.
Dan Farber: Brendan I understand that Tasty Baking produces about 5 million cookies, pies and other sweet produces a day, can you tell me a little bit more about the business?
Brendan O'Malley: Sure we make all kinds of cookies and pies and cakes, all kinds of sweet delicious snacks that we deliver all over the east coast particularly in the Mid Atlantic region everyday, so all fresh delicious products.
Dan Farber: Now as a company that's delivering fresh and delicious products I would understand that logistics, supply chain management, and inventory management is really important. How do you handle that?
Brendan O'Malley: That is a critical part of our business. If you look at us and you compared us to your corner bakery we'd have a lot more in common with it, in terms of the way that we produce things then with a lot of more industrial companies. So we use SAP to manage our supply chain and everything that going on inside our business all of our forecasting , all of our distribution, to make sure we're making the right produces at the right time right to get them to the shelf right when people want to buy them and eat them.
Dan Farber: So are you set up with a kind of just in time manufacturing operation?
Brendan O'Malley: Absolutely. For a bakery that's absolutely critical. Our product, as soon as it becomes inventory that is a problem for us, we're turning over our inventory more then 200 times a year just to have fresh product out there everyday. The quality of the product it's critical that it be fresh.
Dan Farber: I understand that you've been in your factory since 1922 so probably a little bit antiquated and you're moving over the next few years to a new facility 345 thousand square feet. What are the IT challenges in making that transition?
Brendan O'Malley: I think the first challenge anytime your moving out of a facility that you've been in for 90 years, is just understanding where everything is and how everything works. That's a facility that's been there for that long so you have systems layered on top of systems, wires layered on top of wires and things that have been evolved and built and sort of grown up on their own over that time period so we've been spending a lot of time before the move understanding where everything is and what everything is and really making an effort to shut things down that aren't being used, that aren't critical to the operation to make that move as simple as possible and then as we look into the new facility and think about that. It's really a tremendous opportunity to start from scratch, to have a blank page and that's what we've talked about in 2 years and we look at each other and go, ''Wow that not the way we want it to be'' We're going to have to look at ourselves and say, ''Hey we didn't do it right.''
Dan Farber: What's some of the specific concepts you've come up with in terms of transitioning?
Brendan O'Malley: We're trying to make everything complete IP centric. Today in your facilities there is analog telephone lines, digital telephone lines, data lines, there's coaxial cable running everywhere for video. There's multiple sets of wires and networks running throughout the facility that aren't connected so we're trying to push everything to be completely IP centric as much as it's feasible and economically makes sense. To put all of your eggs in one basket in a sense but then it's one basket that we need to watch and focus on and have everybody focus around as opposed to all these multiple and desperate systems.
Dan Farber: How does the factory floor automation fit into your transition plan?
Brendan O'Malley: That's a great question because in our current facility there's very little automation most activities are down by hand so as you go into the new facility we're looking at all the different places that we can plug in automation that makes sense for the business, we want to obviously maintain and improve the quality of the produces as we go forward but also gain the efficiencies of moving into a new facility. We think we can be a lot more accurate, a lot more consistent processes in the new facility. One area in particular that we are spending a lot of time working on is the warehouse, today our warehouse is very much… everything comes out of the SAP system but when it goes down to the floor it's all on a paper based system where guys are carrying around sheets of paper telling them what they've got to go get and pick this and pick this, they're checking that off and going over to a terminal and entering it after they've finished. The way we're going to do that in the new facility and we're actually already implementing this in our existing facility is to go to a voice picking system, where those guys actually have a headset on and their being told to go to this location all by the system directed to each location and checked on what they're putting onto each pallet. So it's really a step forward, we think in terms of the accuracy and the confirmations and the speed and safety for those guys because it'll become a hands free activity for them. They won't be looking down at a piece of paper as they're driving around or thinks like that. I think it's a great opportunity to look at all the places where technology can fit and make us be more efficient and safer and more consistent.
Dan Farber: Now you're starting with kind of a green field in this new facility, do you have a strategy around green and being more environmentally friendly?
Brendan O'Malley: Absolutely both the head quarters and the bakery are both going for the lead certification and we've already taken a bunch of steps in our current operation to become more green within IT particularly with power and cooling within the data center, we've done a tremendous amount of work around virtualization and significantly reduced our server foot print and the number of machines we're using. That for us has been a great benefit even today that we'll carry forward and continue to hammer away at as we get to those new facilities.
Dan Farber: So it's kind of a rare opportunity where you get to kind of bulldoze what you've had before and start completely fresh.
Brendan O'Malley: Absolutely, You know you don't get these opportunities, normally you're trying to fix things on the fly, change out the engine as your flying the plane, but here we really do have the opportunity to start from scratch and set things up absolutely the way we want them to be.
Dan Farber: Brendan, thanks so much for speaking with me.
Brendan O'Malley: Thank you Dan it's been a pleasure.
Dan Farber: I've been speaking with Brendan O'Malley who is CIO of Tasty Baking. For CIO Sessions, I'm Dan Farber thanks for watching.
