The business
A family-run bakery in Uva Province operating five retail outlets, one central production kitchen and three distribution lorries serving roughly [PLACEHOLDER: number] small retailers across two districts. Around [PLACEHOLDER: number] staff, split between production, counter and field sales.
They make a short-shelf-life product, sell it through channels they control and channels they don't, and pay most of their people monthly with statutory EPF and ETF. That combination is exactly where a general-purpose accounting package stops being enough.
The challenge
Before Opernexa, the business ran on three disconnected systems and a lot of paper:
- A billing package at each outlet, with no link between them. Head office learned each branch's takings the next morning, when the books came in. Comparing branch performance meant re-keying totals into a spreadsheet.
- Production planned from memory. The kitchen decided each night's batches from a hand-written estimate of what the branches would need. Overproduction became next-day wastage; underproduction became empty shelves by 10am.
- No visibility into what the lorries actually sold. Reps loaded stock in the morning, came back in the evening with cash and returns, and the reconciliation was a negotiation rather than a calculation.
- Payroll in a spreadsheet. Attendance from a fingerprint machine was typed in by hand, EPF and ETF were calculated by formula each month, and a mistake was only caught when an employee queried their payslip.
- Nobody could answer "what did this batch cost us?" Ingredient purchases, production quantities and sales all lived in different places, so gross margin per product was an educated guess.
The owner's summary: "We knew the business was making money. We could not tell you which branch, which product, or which day."
The solution
Opernexa replaced all of it with one platform, rolled out module by module over [PLACEHOLDER: number] weeks rather than in a single cut-over.
Phase 1 — POS across all five outlets. Every counter moved onto Opernexa POS with a shared item list and one price list maintained centrally. Cashiers keep a keyboard-first workflow they already recognise; head office gets live sales per branch, per hour, per item. Cash-up at close of shift is a counted figure against an expected figure, with the variance recorded.
Phase 2 — Production and inventory in the central kitchen. Recipes were entered as bills of materials with expected yields. Nightly production plans are now built from actual branch sales and standing orders rather than recall. Issuing materials to a work order draws down raw stock automatically, and completing it books finished goods in — so flour on hand and buns on hand are the same ledger.
Phase 3 — Van sales and distribution. Reps moved onto the Opernexa field sales app. Stock is loaded against the lorry in the morning, sales and returns are captured at each outlet on the phone — offline, because coverage on the route is patchy — and the day ends with an automatic reconciliation of loaded versus sold versus returned versus cash collected.
Phase 4 — HR and payroll. Attendance imports from the existing fingerprint machine. Payroll runs monthly with EPF and ETF calculated on the correct earnings base, APIT applied where relevant, payslips generated per employee and a bank transfer file produced for the salary run.
Modules used
Outcomes
- Wastage down [PLACEHOLDER: %] — production planned against real branch demand instead of an overnight estimate.
- Day-end close from [PLACEHOLDER] hours to [PLACEHOLDER] minutes — branch cash-up and van reconciliation are now calculated, not reconstructed.
- Payroll preparation down from [PLACEHOLDER] days to [PLACEHOLDER] hours per month, with EPF and ETF figures no longer hand-calculated.
- Stock accuracy at [PLACEHOLDER: %] on cycle counts, up from an unmeasured baseline.
- Margin visible per product and per branch for the first time — the change the owner names first when asked what actually improved.
What we'd tell a similar business
Two things carried this rollout. First, going module by module: the outlets were stable on POS before the kitchen changed anything, so no single week put the whole business at risk. Second, starting with the counter. POS produces the demand data that makes production planning worth doing — doing it in the other order would have meant planning against guesswork for a month.
If you run several outlets and make what you sell, the sequence that worked here will probably work for you too.