Case Study — Venerdi
From Paper to Real-Time: How Custom Software Transformed a Food Manufacturer's Warehouse
Venerdi makes gluten-free bread for the Australasian market—and until recently, ran a high-volume production facility on spreadsheets and paper forms. Serious Studios built them a custom manufacturing and warehouse management system with full NetSuite integration, turning binders and clipboards into actual business intelligence. The outcome: less admin, faster recall response, and for the first time, real data to make decisions with.
The Challenge
Food manufacturing doesn't forgive sloppiness. Every batch needs tracking. Every temperature reading matters. For Venerdi, managing all of this on paper had stopped being inconvenient and become a liability. Data lived in silos. Production logs sat in binders; QA records were filed separately; accounting reconciled everything days later, if at all. Tracing what happened on the floor meant hunting through three separate paper trails.
Traceability was the worst of it. Gluten-free manufacturing carries strict compliance obligations—every product must trace back to its source ingredients, batch, and supplier. Answering a question like "which products used flour from this delivery?" meant hours of manual detective work.
Quality control was reactive. If an oven ran hot or a batch weight drifted, paper-based systems meant you found out after the batch was done—when your options were rework, waste, or a much harder conversation. Leadership, meanwhile, was flying blind: every report required someone to physically compile numbers from physical records.
The Solution
Serious Studios built a custom manufacturing execution and warehouse management system (MES) tailored to Venerdi's facility, working through the specification with the client from day one before taking over the contract entirely.
Phase 1 — Paper Off the Floor
Six critical stations—Inwards Goods, Premix, Batch Mix, Processing, Packing, and Dispatch—were fitted with rugged tablets running purpose-built software designed for operators in gloves.
Phase 2 — Connecting Everything
The NetSuite integration is the backbone: purchase orders and item master data flow to the tablets each morning automatically; production data flows back to create assembly builds in the accounting system without anyone re-keying a thing.
An escalation module handles real-time monitoring—when a temperature or weight reading consistently falls outside spec, supervisors or the quality team get an alert while there's still time to act.
Phase 3 — Reporting
An integration to Employment Hero and timeclock software meant that hours were also allocated to shifts. With both hour and production data by shift we were able to provide shift reporting for output, yield and productivity using their internal measure of units per labour hour and total labour cost. This provided strong shift reports that could drive continuous improvement in the factory and more accurate budgeting.
The Result
Administrative overhead is down. Traceability queries that once took hours now take minutes. Leadership is making decisions on current data, acting on trends as they emerge rather than after the fact.
We call it Pedro. The beauty of this system is that it is so customised and customisable. There is a lot that we do that off the shelf systems can't handle. The combination of a great system and a close relationship with Serious Studios means that we can make improvements as required by changes in scope, products etc without trouble. Recently we launched a new product with a new processing step, and we found a simple solution within a week. Last year we changed our ERP system from Netsuite to Nexwave moving from API integration to Webhooks and this was done seamlessly by Serious Studios. The system has continued to improve to provide 12 month rolling product performance reports on yield and defects. This with daily, weekly, monthly and rolling monthly productivity reports showing labour variances give us a strong costing model and help to focus in on when products or shifts need attention.
