How a Small Pet Food Manufacturer Supports a 5x Increase in Production Capacity

For Advanced Pet Care of Australia, scaling into one of Australia’s top pet food manufacturers required more than new production capacity – it required better systems, visibility, and control. “Going through this major expansion, we feel that MRPeasy is the software that will assist us and guide us,” says Peter Atsaros, Director.

Growing into one of the largest pet food manufacturers in Australia

Advanced Pet Care of Australia is an Australian pet food manufacturer specializing in dry kibble for dogs and cats. The plant itself has been operating for over 30 years, but the company’s current ownership first became involved in 1997 as a customer of the facility. By 2000, they had taken a minor shareholding in the business, eventually growing their involvement into full control.

The company’s growth has been strongly driven by exports, which today make up around 73% of its production, mostly to Asia. As demand increased, Advanced Pet Care of Australia reached capacity on a single shift, then on two shifts, before deciding to take the business to the next level. In 2019, the company began a major expansion project, building a new purpose-built plant on the same site while continuing to operate its existing facility.

The soon-to-be-commissioned plant will add 50,000 metric tonnes of annual capacity, taking Advanced Pet Care of Australia from 13,000 to 63,000 metric tonnes and placing it among the top five pet food manufacturers in Australia. Equipped with state-of-the-art Swiss Bühler technology, automated bagging and palletizing, dry air moisture control, density control, waste management, and plasma odor control, the facility marks a major step forward for the company.

“We’ve really gone to another level in terms of size,” says Peter Atsaros, Director. “It’s not cheap to manufacture in Australia, and it’s a massive capital investment we’ve made for the long term.”

A scalable system was needed for a larger, more complex operation

As Advanced Pet Care of Australia prepared for its next stage of growth, the company’s existing systems were no longer enough to manage the scale and complexity of the operation. Accounting, stock control, inventory management, payroll, and other core processes had worked well when the business was smaller, but the expansion into multiple locations and the move toward much higher production capacity demanded a more structured approach.

“The systems that were in place at that time used to work,” Atsaros says. “But as you grow, it becomes a little bit harder to manage like that.”

The company first restructured its accounting setup and moved to Xero. From there, Advanced Pet Care of Australia began looking for a system that could handle invoicing, inventory management, production, and traceability while also integrating with Xero.

After reviewing the available options, MRPeasy stood out as the best fit. It covered most of the company’s requirements, supported its manufacturing and inventory needs, and connected with Xero. Just as importantly, it provided a foundation for linking production planning with the company’s equipment management systems, allowing Advanced Pet Care of Australia to move toward live production data and faster decision-making.

“MRPeasy ticked most of the boxes for us,” Atsaros says.

A carefully planned implementation process

Implementing MRPeasy was not a quick plug-and-play project for Advanced Pet Care of Australia. Because the company’s operations involved complex recipes, multiple production stages, strict traceability requirements, and a growing number of locations, the team first needed to understand exactly how the system should fit into the way the business already worked. The full implementation process, from researching software options to setup, testing, and internal training, took close to 12 months. 

As with many ERP implementations, the biggest challenge was not only the software itself, but the change in habits. Teams that had been used to spreadsheets had to learn how to record stock movements, production progress, and material usage directly in the system. Shop floor staff also began using tablets to start, pause, and stop production operations, allowing the company to capture more accurate live production data.

“You need to make sure your people are on board for the journey,” Atsaros says. “If you have systems and people don’t really embrace them, it’s basically garbage in, garbage out.”

Better visibility for the business and more reliable answers for customers

For Advanced Pet Care of Australia, one of the biggest benefits of MRPeasy has been visibility. The company can now see what stock is on hand, where materials are located, what has been consumed, what is due to arrive, and how current and future production orders affect inventory. This is especially important in a business where some imported ingredients can have lead times of up to three months.

This improved visibility supports better forecasting, purchasing, production planning, costing, and customer service. Instead of relying on spreadsheets and manual checks, the team can make decisions based on current data from across the business.

“We often wonder now how we managed everything without this visibility,” says Atsaros.

The benefits also reach Advanced Pet Care of Australia’s customers, even if they do not see the system directly. When a customer places an order or asks whether a job can be brought forward, the team can quickly check stock levels, raw material availability, production schedules, and lead times. This helps the company give realistic answers instead of overpromising.

“MRPeasy allows us to quickly determine whether we are able to fulfill an order in the requested timeframe or when the earliest completion date would be,” Atsaros says. “This ensures that we do not overpromise and underdeliver, and that we keep customers happy.”

MRPeasy also helps during new product development and pricing discussions. Advanced Pet Care of Australia creates tailor-made recipes for customers, often with specific nutritional, ingredient, and price requirements. By using historical cost data and ingredient information in MRPeasy, the team can compare similar recipes, assess raw material availability, consider shelf-life limitations, and make better decisions during the design process.

The system is expected to become even more valuable as the company brings its new production line online. With two lines available, Advanced Pet Care of Australia will be able to use costing data to decide whether a particular recipe should be made on the existing line or the new automated line, depending on run size, energy use, labor requirements, and economies of scale.

“With the launching of the new production line in September, we can use MRPeasy to figure out if a production run would be more profitable on the old or the new line,” Atsaros says.

Traceability, inventory, production, and costing are central to daily use

Compliance and traceability are critical in pet food manufacturing, especially for an export-focused business that holds HACCP certification and is a member of the Pet Food Industry Association of Australia. To retain its export-accredited status, the company must regularly demonstrate full control over ingredient handling, storage, and movement, including for imported materials that may be subject to biosecurity requirements. MRPeasy helps the team maintain the records needed to answer audit questions quickly and confidently, from when an ingredient arrived on site to where it was stored, how long it remained there, and which products it was ultimately used in.

“During audits, it is not enough to say that everything was handled correctly. You need to be able to show the full trail,” Atsaros says. “MRPeasy gives us the visibility we need to support our HACCP, export, and biosecurity compliance requirements.”

The production team also uses MRPeasy to track manufacturing orders, bills of materials, routings, and live shop floor progress. This also improves stocktaking, as the company can compare what is physically counted with what the system expects to be there, based on incoming materials, manufacturing orders, and consumption.

“MRPeasy enables us to get down to the fine details. We can see what the recipe said we were meant to use, what we actually used, and how that affects inventory,” says Atsaros. 

Cost tracking is another important feature. Advanced Pet Care of Australia uses MRPeasy together with Xero to connect production, invoicing, inventory values, raw material costs, finished goods, and financial reporting. The company can look back at historical raw material costs, calculate production costs, and support pricing decisions with better data.

“With MRPeasy, we can check the average prices of ingredients or the cost of labor in previous periods, see how our costs have changed, and take appropriate action,” Atsaros says.

The new system helped manage a major crisis

While Advanced Pet Care of Australia was managing the factory expansion project, the company was hit by an unexpected crisis. In June 2023, a fire broke out in one of its buildings, affecting the dryer area of the plant.

“It didn’t look like much at the time,” says Atsaros. “We thought the damage wasn’t too serious and we’d be back up and running in about 12 weeks. It took 20 months.”

The company had to construct a new facility, replace damaged equipment, bring back and modify existing machinery, and comply with updated regulations. All of this happened while Advanced Pet Care of Australia was already deep into its expansion project, commissioning new equipment, and preparing to significantly increase production capacity.

For a manufacturer with long-term customer commitments, export demand, and production planned months in advance, proving the impact of the interruption was no simple task. The business had to demonstrate patterns, planned manufacturing orders, customer commitments, and forward-looking demand while also continuing to manage day-to-day operations.

“It was a tedious time,” Atsaros says. “Insurance companies requiring completion of all due diligence procedures during the claim process were asking, “How can you guarantee that what you did last year, you will do again this year? Was that just a one-off year?”

Luckily, Advanced Pet Care of Australia had nearly a full year of production data in MRPeasy, and the team could quickly pull manufacturing orders, planned jobs, stock movements, purchasing records, and customer commitments to show what had been scheduled before the fire. This gave the company a clear, structured way to demonstrate production trends and expected future demand, rather than relying only on historical financial records and manual documentation. 

“Apart from using it as our everyday tool – and I hope we never have to use it in this way ever again – it was also very helpful in complying with a lot of the queries that were coming our way from the insurers,” says Atsaros. 

A robust software ecosystem that supports the company’s ambitions

For other manufacturers considering an ERP or MRP system, Atsaros says the first step is to understand your own business properly. A successful implementation depends on knowing what you want to achieve, which processes need to be supported, and where the current bottlenecks are.

His advice is also to be realistic. A system like MRPeasy can bring major improvements, but only if it is set up properly and used consistently by the team. That means manufacturers should avoid treating implementation as a purely technical project. Staff training, process design, and change management are just as important.

According to Atsaros, a properly integrated app ecosystem is essential to manufacturers looking to scale up operations. For Advanced Pet Care of Australia, MRPeasy provides the confidence, efficiency, and visibility needed to quintuple their capacity in a relatively short timeframe.

“Going through this major expansion, we feel that MRPeasy is the software that will assist us and guide us, together with the other applications that coexist in the same ecosystem,” he says.

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