Traeger Grills is a leading innovator in wood pellet grills and smokers. With Epicor Manufacturing, Traeger can manage key business processes while scaling for growth.
Headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, Traeger Grills specializes in the design and manufacture of wood pellet grilling systems that bypass conventional propane and charcoal burner capabilities-creating healthy foods with a flavorful, smoky taste.
We're growing like crazy in an incredibly competitive industry.
Offering a complete line of grills, hardwood pellets, sauces, and accessories, Traeger surpassed its own expectations by increasing year-to-year sales by nearly 40 percent over the last three years. Among the driving forces behind this sales boost was an expanded retail channel consisting of big box and specialty dealers, online venues, and specialty events that dramatically generated greater awareness among key audiences-ranging from barbecue enthusiasts to world-renowned chefs.
“We're growing like crazy in an incredibly competitive industry,” said Ryan Newman, vice president of IT, Traeger Grills. “This can be attributed not only to the heightened sale of our hardwood grilling systems that virtually anyone can master, but also the highly responsive and reliable fulfillment of daily orders. Customer service is as important to our business as the very high quality of our products.”
After an intensive search and a nine-month implementation period, the Epicor enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution went live in 2015. This newly updated version of the Epicor ERP system (now known as Kinetic) was designed to address real-world scenarios in a global economy by creating a standardized method for mining data and seamlessly centralizing operational functions.
Epicor is the foundation for our key business processes.
“Epicor is the foundation for our key business processes,” offered Newman. “It really hit the sweet spot by enabling us to scale our business for growth, while taking advantage of a wide variety of new vertical market opportunities. The system also reinforced the companywide adherence of strict traditional and proven business practices. This includes better tracking product sales, so we can more accurately manage our revenue stream and reporting. Everything from sales order management to supply chain fulfillment flows in and out of Epicor.”
According to Newman, Traeger Grills receives tens of thousands of product requests monthly from hundreds of sources using varying software programs and formats. All orders are then funneled through Epicor for processing at numerous warehousing facilities nationwide. This includes assessing inventory and directing shipments from the best locations to reduce delivery time and costs.
Traeger recently extended these capabilities even further with the addition of the Epicor Cloud ERP solution-developed to manage orders and operations in one integrated, web-based ERP solution. This eliminated the need to dedicate limited internal resources to its upkeep, while providing the ability to add virtual services on the fly and easily scale up or down to accommodate extremely busy or slow sales periods. On the financial side, the cloud system also reduced costs across multiple locations by transferring its maintenance offsite to Epicor and turning capital to operational expenses.
“We're experts in grilling, not warehousing,” added Dave Gebert, director of business analysis and analytics for Traeger Grills. “Our orders are fulfilled by third parties, so a very high degree of coordination and integration is needed to ensure our customers receive their products within an average of seven business days, without problems.
All that wasted time and effort has been eliminated.
“Epicor has enabled us to clearly understand the availability and location of stock in real time. Prior to its installation, there was a great deal of back and forth. All that wasted time and effort has been eliminated. We can now flexibly move orders among the various warehouses to increase freight savings. This is all done through dashboards that can be easily updated to include new fields and data requests that have greatly enhanced our inventory allocation expertise. As a result, our relationship with everyone-dealers, consumers, suppliers, and vendors-has been greatly enhanced and strengthened across the board.”