Food manufacturer scales from $250M to nearly $1B across multiple sites and acquisitions without letting its systems become the bottleneck.
It's been a steep climb. When Melissa joined, SK Food Group was a single plant running four to six production lines. Today it's four full production facilities across 8–9 locations, and the business has grown from roughly $250 million in revenue to just under $1 billion in less than 14 years—a near-24/7 food manufacturing operation moving an enormous volume of product every day.
As Director of Information Technology, Melissa effectively runs the nervous system of that business: enterprise applications, data infrastructure, IT and operational technology across the plants, spanning four companies. Holding it together through all that growth has been Sage X3.
"It's been a rapid, rapid ride," she says. "And we were able to accomplish this quite well with our use of X3."
What makes that volume manageable is that almost all of it runs through one system. A standard week starts with forecasting and sales orders, flows into purchasing, and moves through the workflows that manage manufacturing across the plants—with the financials tying everything together. SK Food Group runs nearly every Sage X3 module, adding only two or three bolt-ons for specific needs.
"The result is a single source of truth that every part of the business works from.
"It's our core source of information. We all start from it," Melissa says. "Every business department uses it." Finance reports up to the holding company on a rapid cadence; operations, distribution, and manufacturing all draw on the same data."
"If we weren't all drinking from the same fountain, we couldn't operate the way we do," she says.
That alignment is what lets a lean operation coordinate enormous complexity without the parts pulling against each other.
"SK Food Group hasn't grown by customer volume alone. It has grown by absorbing other companies—and the real test of a scalable system is what happens when you do.
"We did three in one year," Melissa says."
Three acquisitions, three migrations off three different platforms—Sage 100, Sage 300, QuickBooks—onto Sage X3, inside a single year. Each went relatively smoothly, because the team knew the system cold: it was easy to train new users on, and the data was straightforward to move.
"Each acquired business runs slightly different processes—but X3 lets them stay operationally independent while rolling up consistent financials to the holding company.
That pace is only possible because of how configurable Sage X3 is underneath. The platform is parameter-driven, letting SK Food Group tailor it to the specifics of food manufacturing—and to the quirks of each acquired business—without rebuilding from scratch."
"I can't imagine trying to grow a company at this rate without that kind of flexibility within the ERP," Melissa says. "The system lends itself to be pliable to just about any situation you can imagine."
In food manufacturing, knowing where everything came from isn't an operational nicety. It's a matter of consumer safety.
Sage X3 lets SK Food Group track components from receipt through issue and expiry across all its stock, so that in the rare event of a recall, the company can act fast and precisely. A recall module, retained through SK Food Group's partner Next Tech, lets the team isolate affected items quickly when it counts.
For Melissa, this is where the system's reliability matters most—because the people downstream of it are the ones consuming the product.
"We're here to keep our customers, our extended customers, safe," she says. It's very important to us to have an application that supports us in that endeavor.
Melissa's confidence in Sage X3 is worth weighing precisely because she doesn't take it on faith. Every few years, she goes looking at what else the market has to offer.
"I'm constantly keeping my eye out to see if there's something bigger, better, faster," she says. There generally isn't. Nobody wants to change their ERP, so you always go into that mindset when you're out there shopping. But so far, I haven't found anything compelling that compares.
That's a sharper endorsement than enthusiasm. It's the repeated conclusion of someone whose job is to find a better option—and who keeps deciding to stay.
"My hope is that it gets us to the next billion or two," she says."
