Infor®, the industry cloud company, announced that Ruiz Food Products, Inc. (Ruiz Foods), a frozen food manufacturer specializing in Mexican food products, has migrated its entire Infor product platform to the cloud. The integrated Infor platform helped Ruiz Foods to modernize its operations, especially through the use of scanners, planning tools and data analytics. This was especially important to help Ruiz Foods navigate meaningful changes in product demand brought on by several years of industry disruptions including the Covid-19 pandemic.
Ruiz Foods has manufactured and delivered high-quality Mexican food since 1964. Today, it is the leading American manufacturer of frozen Mexican food with over 4,000 employees and facilities in California, Texas, and South Carolina. Between its five plants, Ruiz Foods generates more than half a million Infor transactions per day when manufacturing, its burritos, chimichangas, taquitos, enchiladas, tamales, quesadillas, breakfast burritos, and more.
An Infor customer for more than 20 years, Ruiz Foods has used a variety of Infor solutions on-premises, including Infor Optiva, M3, Supply Chain Planning, Factory Track, and EPM. In 2022 Ruiz Foods’ data center hardware needed to be replaced, requiring a significant capital investment. Ruiz Foods’ SVP/CIO, Michael Warter, also recognized that Infor, the company’s long-time technology partner, was strategically committed to the cloud.
“It was the strategic technology benefits that gave us the impetus to move,” explained Warter. “It had become very clear over the past several years that Infor was investing significantly in its cloud offering and that most of its latest innovations were coming out for cloud. In order for us to stay strategically aligned with Infor, we needed to move to the cloud to access the solution’s absolute latest capabilities. The move is a win-win because we are saving a considerable amount of capital, which we’ve been able to redirect to other initiatives, while staying aligned with our technology partner.”
While agreeing that moving to Infor CloudSuite Food & Beverage was a good business decision, Ruiz Foods’ leadership team was reluctant to start a huge, and potentially expensive, cloud migration project, especially with the pandemic playing out worldwide. With this in mind, Warter worked with Infor CTO and President of Products & Customer Success Soma Somasundaram and Infor partner Doppio Group to devise a plan to transition Ruiz Foods gradually to the cloud instead of moving everything simultaneously. “We were able to find a way to step into the cloud without having to do it all at once as a big bang,” said Warter.
The company started with upgrading its Infor PLM for Process (Optiva) into the cloud, which provided a way for Ruiz Foods to capture raw materials, subcomponents and finished goods in a way that illuminated product financials. Ruiz Foods was able to determine value drivers in the business by analyzing the costs of raw materials and subcomponents for individual finished goods and thereby track product profitability. Ruiz Foods then used these insights to rationalize the SKU (stock-keeping unit) portfolio to weather the emerging and ongoing economic challenges in the food industry.
“What we learned when we started allocating all these costs back through the product cycle is that it changed some of our profitability assumptions,” Warter explained. “That, in turn, changed some of our strategy in terms of where we wanted to make investments. This insight has proven to be valuable to our business.”
Infor’s configurability helps Ruiz Foods react quickly to support the dynamic needs of our customers. The Ruiz Foods’ Supply Chain Planning team uses the Infor planning tools to adapt to an ever changing business environment and manage manufacturing schedules daily.
Ruiz Foods looks forward to continuing its 20+ year partnership with Infor to grow and optimize its business.
“Our business model is built on working with customers to create mutually beneficial outcomes. We try to focus on the business problem they need to solve, and work together to find a solution,” said Somasundaram. “Our relationship with Ruiz Foods is an example of the type of bidirectional, collaborative relationship we strive to have with all of our customers.”
