Bella & Duke — one of the UK’s largest pet food manufacturers, producing raw pet food for cats and dogs from Dunfermline, Scotland
The challenge
As Bella & Duke scaled rapidly, the business needed to keep customers satisfied without slowing down or forcing disruptive change. Much of the operation ran on Excel spreadsheets and whiteboards. That had worked at lower volumes, but got harder to keep accurate as throughput increased, especially once a new 1,000+ pallet cold store came online and added complexity across stock handling, material visibility and day-to-day operations.
The specific problems: limited visibility of raw materials and finished product across cold storage, difficulty tracking pallet locations, storage dates and material availability, poor timing and coordination of inbound supply chain materials, and inconsistent material assignment on the shop floor that disrupted production flow. Confidence in stock data mattered more every month, because customer satisfaction depended on fulfilling orders accurately and on time.
How Simportal worked
Simportal worked on site with the Bella & Duke team, starting with structure and discipline before any software went in. Clear, practical manual processes were agreed first, for how materials should be received, stored, moved and issued from the cold store, and embedded until they worked in practice.
Only once stock management and traceability were reliable did Simportal introduce scanning and stock control in the cold store, so pallet movements were captured as part of normal work and everyone shared the same trusted view of material location and availability.
With stock control in place, Simportal built out the production processes needed to support continued growth, designed around real material availability rather than assumptions, linking stock, production activity and order fulfilment through trusted operational data. Traceability was embedded directly into everyday operations, from receipt through storage and production, without adding overhead.
By the end of this, the Excel spreadsheets and whiteboards Bella & Duke started with were gone. Production now runs on 100% digital production control: every pallet, every material movement and every production step is captured live, with no manual fallback left in day-to-day operation.
The result
100% digital production control, with Excel and whiteboards fully retired. End-to-end traceability embedded into daily operations. Turnover doubled, while stock accuracy stayed above 99%.
Bella & Duke scaled with confidence, improving customer satisfaction while keeping clear operational control across stock, cold storage and production as the business grew.