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Bay Area Bakery Sweetens Operations with New Technologies

Sugar Bowl Bakery | Taking the Pulse

Bay area based Sugar Bowl Bakery sells and ships its baked donuts, brownies and pastries to retailers Starbucks, Costco and Safeway every day. The small business averages yearly sales of more than 40 million dollars and recently spent 400,000 dollars on an IT makeover to help streamline operations. Correspondent Sumi Das interviews Sugar Bowl Bakery president Andrew Ly and general manager Michael Ly about the various technologies the SMB is using to manage its operations, from deploying inventory management software to building new cooking systems that help the bakery produce their products in mass volume.

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Tags: Operation, Information Technology, Bay Area, Inventory Management, Smb/Sme, Enterprise Software, Software, Sugar Bowl Bakery

 

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Bay Area Bakery Sweetens Operations with New Technologies

Bay area based Sugar Bowl Bakery sells and ships its baked donuts, brownies and pastries to retailers Starbucks, Costco and Safeway every day. The small business averages yearly sales of more than 40 million dollars and recently spent 400,000 dollars on an IT makeover to help streamline operations. Correspondent Sumi Das interviews Sugar Bowl Bakery president Andrew Ly and general manager Michael Ly about the various technologies the SMB is using to manage its operations, from deploying inventory management software to building new cooking systems that help the bakery produce their products in mass volume.

>> Michael: So, Tracy, so how's the production today?

>> Tracy: The production today is running well, very smoothly, everything is on time, on schedule.

>> Michael: So no issue?

>> Tracy: So far no issue.

>> Michael: Oh Okay.

>> Michael Lee is the General Manager at the Sugar Bowl Bakery, today he's on deadline.

>> Michael: They're packaging four donuts to a box; normally we make about 5,000 glazed donuts --

>> A day?

>> Michael: Yeah, and then we make about 6,000 chocolate glazed donuts.

>> The small business needs to deliver an order to Starbucks, one of its biggest customers.

>> Michael: I would say 99% of the time we fulfill the order, we know how to handle it, you know, even though it's a stressful, you know,

situation.

>> Handling stressful situations is nothing new for the company to meet customer demand Lee and his team rely on business technology.

>> Andrew: I seriously started because at the time --

>> Implementing IT was the idea of Andrew Lee, the company's president.

>> Andrew: So the technology is incredibly helpful to us. I went to school, I studied computer science and that helps me.

>> Lee started the family business with his four brothers after emigrating from Vietnam; they opened a small donut shop with $40,000

in 1984.

>> Hi, this is Sugar Bowl Bakery.

>> Since then the Sugar Bowl Bakery has grown, today their sales average more than $40,000,000 a year and they have 3 manufacturing

plants, which supply their pastries to Asia, Canada, and the U.S. There number one product is pomeas phonetic which they sell to

retailer Costco, they make 500,000 a day.

>> Andrew: We make 24 hours a day, 6 days a week non stop.

>> So you've come a long way since your beginnings as a very small coffee shop.

>> Andrew: Right

>> How did you get to this point?

>> Andrew: Well, I believe that you work, you have to determine what you want and how you work and you have to be persistent. So we

just persist on what we do and determine how we do it.

>> One of the things they did was build a system that would help the business manage financial data and inventory across their various

locations, the investment, $400,000.

>> It's something that we knew, like a couple years ago we had to do because if you don't have visibility on how your business operates

you can't run it efficiently.

>> Now, the bakery can keep track of all the ingredients calculating various purchase orders from how many pounds of butter they need

for their donuts to the amount of chocolate used in their brownie bites. Sugar Bowl Bakery also installed a data center to manage

operations internally.

>> So, this is our data center this is where our IT system is stored at. So our business server powers our PRP business software and

then we also have our email system and we also have our file server where all the employees they store their business files and we also

have a remote desktop server which allows people to log into their computer and their files when they're either out of the office

or they're traveling.

>> The technology addition that has made the biggest difference inside the bakery and makes sure their pastries taste great is this

machine right here.

>> This computer you can set the temperature volume, the highest temperatures and the lowest and so your products will be very consistent

and it comes out to be extremely high-quality product.

>> Without these technologies Lee wouldn't be able to produce in mass volume and expand the business, which he says he's looking to do.

What do you imagine that you will be doing in the future? Do you want to be the next Sara Lee Bakery or how big do you want to get?

>> We want our products to be everywhere and that is what we are working towards. At this point here we can not compare ourselves to

Sara Lee or General Mills or whoever out there but we determined to go at the pace that we want to go.

>> Michael: These donuts, they're going to Starbucks.

>> As for today's deadline Michael and his team were able to get their donut order out on time, a successful day at the Sugar Bowl Bakery.

For BNET, I'm Sumi Das.