1. Customer Testimonials
  2. MANA Nutrition

MANA Nutrition Fights Global Childhood Malnutrition with Oracle NetSuite Social Impact

MANA Nutrition

Company

MANA Nutrition

Location

Charlotte, N.C.

Industry

Nonprofit, Manufacturing

Solutions

NetSuite
SuiteAnalytics

Partner

Sererra Consulting Group

Location

Irvine, Calif.

“NetSuite is helping us keep our IT costs and complexity to a minimum—that's a huge benefit for us. Ease of use is also really important. NetSuite allows us to have a factory-sophisticated workforce use a pretty complex ERP system with ease.” MANA Nutrition

Customer Success

  • Nonprofit MANA Nutrition, an Oracle NetSuite Social Impact donation recipient, runs its accounting, inventory management, manufacturing and sales business processes on NetSuite and is realizing continual improvements in both the speed of its manufacturing process and the quality of its products.
  • Founded in 2010, MANA aims to draw attention to, alleviate and eradicate severe acute malnutrition, a life-threatening condition which affects 20 million children around the world aged between six months and five years old.
  • MANA owns and operates a factory in Fitzgerald, Ga., which produces packets of nutrient-rich milk suspended in peanut butter, a ready-to-use therapeutic food (RUTF) used to treat severe acute malnutrition.
  • Running its manufacturing operations on NetSuite, MANA is able to produce, test and package 500,000 packets of RUTF per day, enough to feed 1,500 acutely malnourished children over a six-week period, onsite at its factory.
  • MANA took advantage of the opportunities through the Social Impact program for free and discounted licensing. The nonprofit can pass on those savings by lowering the prices of RUTF for its international aid customers.

Challenges

  • MANA needed an ERP system which would enable it to manufacture RUTF to the very strict quality assurance and quality control specifications laid down by UNICEF, the primary purchaser and distributor of MANA's RUTF.
  • The nonprofit required an ERP system which could fully support its food handling needs such as log tracking and it wanted a cloud solution with strong ease of use. MANA chose NetSuite over Microsoft Dynamics and Sage, which didn't provide cloud software and weren't as user-friendly as NetSuite.
  • As a startup, MANA was looking for an ERP vendor with cloud-based software able to scale as its manufacturing operations grew and which could also provide MANA with advice on establishing best practices across its operations.
  • MANA needed an ERP system which could provide a single unified source of reliable manufacturing data to ensure it could pass tough external audits from UNICEF.

Solution

  • Going live on NetSuite in 2010 as it opened its factory allowed MANA to establish manufacturing processes which met all of UNICEF's specifications including recall process management from both the raw materials and finish product perspectives, the log tracking of raw ingredients, and third-party vendor qualifications.
  • The levels of computer familiarity and IT literacy are fairly low among MANA's 25-strong factory workforce so NetSuite's configurability has been key in customizing dashboards to fit end-user roles and to make ERP easy to use and simple to access on the factory floor from employees' laptops and smartphones.
  • Being able to enter data into a real-time system like NetSuite is particularly important for MANA's quality team who have to pull RUTF off the production line and test it every two hours and who have checklists to complete for every factory lot of RUTF produced.
  • By using NetSuite's financials, MANA can take advantage of dimension tracking to meet grant requirements. The nonprofit is able to report back to funders on a timely and accurate basis about the source and use of funds from individual donors and when strict grant milestones were achieved.
  • MANA has also recently adopted NetSuite SuiteAnalytics to help automate its financial reporting enabling the nonprofit to see, for example, how it is performing against grant milestones.
  • MANA has unique logistics when it comes to managing inventory, which it is able to handle thanks to NetSuite. In order to be able to respond to one-off urgent aid needs, the nonprofit needs real-time insight into its entire inventory to determine how much RUTF is available and how much is non-available, i.e., it has already been pre-allocated to an aid agency customer.
  • As a nonprofit, MANA holds a unique position in the RUTF market which is dominated by for-profit manufacturers. Using NetSuite, MANA is able to participate in the competitive bidding process and win. For instance, in 2014 MANA was the lowest-priced RUTF producer in the world and continues to use its nonprofit status to help drive global prices of RUTF down.
  • Thanks to NetSuite, MANA is able to smoothly document and present complete real-time data on its manufacturing operations to visiting UNICEF inspectors to easily pass stringent audits conducted by the international aid organization.
  • MANA benefits from the annual systems health check provided by its NetSuite implementation partner Sererra Consulting which provides insight into furthering honing business processes and the user experience based on Sererra's manufacturing and nonprofit industry expertise.

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