Diana Cortes-Blanquicet is a talented pastry chef who co-founded DOU Bakehouse in 2015. Her excellent pastry skills meant she quickly grew from a home-based operation into a dedicated wholesale facility in Lakeland, Florida, not far from Orlando. Fast growth is what just about every business wants, but it doesn’t come without its share of growing pains as Diana discovered.

Diana’s DOU Bakehouse became a popular supplier of cookies, muffins, cakes, breads and donuts to local coffee shops, theme parks and resorts in the Orlando area. When she had the chance to win a very substantial order from a world-renowned Orlando theme park, Diana was so excited. But then she came to some sobering realizations. DOU Bakehouse didn’t have all of the more stringent traceability, auditing and documentation processes that this customer required.

That’s where an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system comes in. Diana did her due diligence by researching a number of traceability and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and implemented one that was not too complicated to use, but still had all the features she needed and was affordable. And she won the theme park’s business!

It didn’t take long for Diana to learn firsthand the benefits of implementing a powerful, but user friendly, ERP. “We recently completed our required annual third party audit. For the traceability portion, the auditor selects one product and times us to see how long it takes to check where the product is in-house and at customer locations. The auditor also manually checks in-house inventory against what is in our records,” she says. “It took us less than 10 minutes to complete the mock recall portion of the audit successfully. That capability is so important because if there is a recall, it’s much faster to pull the product.” For example, Wherefour provides total forward-and-backward ingredient traceability reports–literally–with the push of one button.

Diana also really appreciates having an ERP that is fully cloud-based and mobile because it allows her to monitor and run her business from anywhere. The ERP software records everything that happens, and the data is all in one place. “I can travel and still know what is going on. The system automatically lets me know if I need to place an inventory order, and I don’t have to check it manually,” Diana says. “If something is not done right, we know exactly what happened and can correct the situation for the future.”