Lone Star epitomizes the “great American success story.” The bakery was started in 1889 by a German immigrant who adopted San Antonio as his home. His specialty was bread, which quickly earned a reputation for flavor, freshness and consistent quality. In 1956, the Morris family purchased the growing bakery and today it remains their family business. A changing world and new technologies led the Morris family to expand their horizons and they adopted a new freezing technique, which allowed them to preserve the flavor and freshness of their products. With the new technology, the family began to shift emphasis toward frozen institutional type baking products. Today, Lone Star operates on a grand scale, providing a wide variety of private label bakery items to grocery chains, restaurants and food service distributors nationwide.
Lone Star Bakery operates two manufacturing facilities in suburban San Antonio. The smaller of the two sites produces products regulated by the USDA. These items include processed meats and cheeses, such as “hot pockets”-type meals in a bun, pizza shells and “pigs in a blanket.” The second plant, a 200,000 square foot facility, specializes in producing pies, cakes, cinnamon rolls, bread loaves, biscuits and other delicacies. The facility incorporates a 20,000 square foot freezer and four silos, each of which stores 100,000 pounds of flour. With three 260 sq. ft. continuous feed band ovens and an 80 sq. ft. indirect fire band oven, the plant has the capacity to produce 2.5 million biscuits per day.
Neuhoff is jubilant about the improvements he has seen in Lone Star’s operations since the Syspro software went live. “Everything is now at our fingertips – it’s a true real-time system,” he states. He points out that the software has enabled Lone Star to operate more economically through tighter inventory controls and the ability to forecast and make more judicious purchasing decisions.
With perpetual inventory tracking and superior production scheduling, the Syspro software allows Lone Star to place timely orders with suppliers rather than storing massive amounts of inventory – an impressive ability considering Lone Star’s production schedule changes every 24-48 hours.
“Some companies specialize in only one type of product, Lone Star can easily reconfigure to produce a multitude of products. “We can do it all, and we are able to run multiple lines on the same day,”
— Jerome Neuhoff, Controller, Lone Star
Lone Star flash-freezes its bakery products and stores them in a freezer holding up to 120 truckloads, filling about 40 truckloads weekly for 200+ US customers.
Its large, modern facilities allow more economical production and storage than competitors, while easily supporting growth. Controller Jerome Neuhoff notes, “One never knows when a smaller customer’s product is going to really take off.” Operational flexibility is another strength — unlike single-product competitors, Lone Star reconfigures easily to run multiple lines at once.
In the mid-1990s, despite modern facilities, the bakery still relied on manual bookkeeping. Neuhoff helped select Syspro in 1996 as a better fit for manufacturing than more distribution-focused alternatives.
Originally on Novell 3.12, Syspro now runs on an upgraded Windows 2000 server with 16 concurrent users, linking the two plants via separate T1 lines for data and voice.
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