Getting Efficient with SyteLine – A Client Success Story: Part 1

Last October, many were fortunate enough to hear Jeff Winkler speak about their use of SyteLine. Jeff Winkler is the Operations Manager of Vita Plus Corporation and has been with the company since 1984, where he started out as a livestock nutritionist.

Jeff gave a presentation at our SyteLineCon conference last year on Doc-Trak: A Customer’s Experience to Get Organized and Efficient and also participated in the Better Your Best Contest, where participants shared their experiences on how The Lake Companies’ modules have made a significant impact and contribution to their businesses’ success. As one of the three finalists in the contest, Jeff Winkler was awarded third place.

About Vita Plus Corporation

Vita Plus Corporation is an employee-owned company headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin. Specializing in feed products and services for the livestock industry, Vita Plus has been serving livestock producers since 1948 with facilities and a strong dealer network across the upper Midwest.

Winkler pointed out in his presentation at SyteLineCon that producing livestock feed is almost identical to producing food manufactured for human consumption. Like people food, Vita Plus and their products are regulated by the FDA, the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, and the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA). With this kind of government oversight, their products are required to have a high amount of traceability so that at any given time, an FDA inspector or compliance auditor can walk into one of their facilities and demand to see anything related to the manufacturing or transportation of their products. Thus, it greatly simplifies the process for the investigator and Vita Plus employees to have a document management system that makes the document retrieval flow easy and without delay.

SyteLine and Doc-Trak Onboarding

Back in 1992, Vita Plus developed a value statement to strive to work with the best in the industry. That value statement was a key factor in beginning their relationship with SyteLine and Doc-Trak.

We purchased SyteLine 2.7 in 1992 and we implemented and went live with 3.0 in 1993, said Winkler.

Winkler points out, Our goal when we started was to have a simple and accurate program. No matter what document or module we were talking about, we wanted it to be visible from everywhere. We have several remote employees, people who work from home, locations in several different states, and they can all access any document. No more file cabinets.

Like many of the businesses The Lake Companies has helped with Doc-Trak, Vita Plus was swimming in document overflow. We would store our documents in file cabinets and then in a closet full of bankers boxes, Winkler said. Eventually those boxes would be put on pallets and moved to a storage facility across the street.

Since making the transition to Doc-Trak, the paper filing, storage, and location problems have disappeared.

The compliance auditors have been impressed. They are primarily focused on Agriculture sector compliance. Most of the places they do business don’t have as powerful of an ERP program, if they even have one at all, or a Doc-Trak document management program like Vita Plus does. We used to have pallets (of paperwork) stored in bankers boxes that we kept in our warehouse. In our business, we are regulated by the FDA, and they want to see documents, and it’s not very impressive to open a door to a room that is total chaos and hope to find the document you are looking for and that the box is labeled correctly with the right documents inside.

Next Up

Join us in Part 2 of this series to read the dramatic testimonials of Vita Plus employees on how The Lake Companies’ solutions transformed their work practices.