How a Retail Bakery Modernized Its Systems During Rapid Growth

Business Challenges

• A rapidly expanding retail bakery lacked the project structure, stakeholder accountability, and implementation roadmap needed to successfully transition from manual processes to enterprise inventory and point-of-sale systems.
• Competing internal priorities and misaligned incentives across departments created bottlenecks that stalled progress on critical system implementations.
• The finance and accounting function was stretched thin, with month-end close responsibilities, an active system implementation, and an upcoming external audit all running simultaneously.

Key Outcomes

• Established a structured implementation framework, including stakeholder assignments, milestone tracking, issues management, and business process flow documentation that brought order to a previously unmanaged rollout.
• Resolved critical data integrity and inventory depletion gaps by evaluating system capabilities across multiple platforms and guiding the team toward a solution that best fit each location type.
• Freed up internal leadership capacity by assuming full ownership of the FY24 audit process, enabling the controller to remain focused on the ongoing system implementation.

Project Overview

A PE-backed national retail bakery had been growing at a pace that its existing systems could no longer support. With roughly 80% of revenue flowing through brick-and-mortar locations and the remainder through e-commerce, the business relied on accurate, real-time data across sales, inventory, and finance to sustain its expansion. The infrastructure underpinning those functions, including point-of-sale, inventory management, and financial reporting, had not kept pace.

Bridgepoint Consulting was initially engaged to provide interim controller support while the company conducted a search for a permanent hire. Over the course of 13 months, that scope expanded significantly. Our team ultimately served as the project lead for a multi-system technology implementation, managed the FY24 financial audit, and handled the majority of month-end close responsibilities throughout the engagement.

Business Challenge

When our consultant joined the engagement, a technology overhaul was already underway, but without the structure needed to execute it successfully. The company was migrating its point-of-sale system and its inventory management from manual spreadsheets to enterprise platforms, but no formal project framework existed. There were no identified key stakeholders, no implementation timeline, no dependency mapping, and no issues management process in place. A self-employed operations consultant had been supporting portions of the work, but significant gaps remained.

As our team stepped into the interim controller role and gained visibility into the business, the depth of those gaps became clear. Three core issues surfaced: how data would flow accurately between systems, how inventory depletion would be handled in a way that finance and accounting could rely on, and who would own each process once systems went live. None of these had been addressed before go-live planning began.

Compounding the implementation challenges was an organizational dynamic that proved difficult to manage throughout the engagement. Key stakeholders had competing priorities. These misaligned incentives created repeated delays and required ongoing stakeholder management throughout the project.

The Approach

When our consultant transitioned into the project lead role, we built the implementation structure from the ground up. This included stakeholder task assignments, milestone tracking, dependency mapping, issues management, and a business process flow chart showing how each system would connect. Weekly working sessions allowed us to surface and resolve gaps before they became go-live blockers.

A significant pivot came mid-engagement when one of the inventory management platforms proved to be a poor fit for the bakery locations. Our team led the evaluation of an alternative solution, facilitated due diligence with the relevant vendors, and guided stakeholders through the transition — while retaining the original platform for the commissary locations where it remained better suited to production and distribution workflows.

In parallel, our team managed the majority of inventory-related month-end close procedures, designed AP reconciliation workflows to improve accuracy of receipted goods, and validated sales data syncing into the company’s ERP to ensure completeness of weekly deposits. Toward the end of the engagement, our focus shifted to the FY24 audit, taking over all audit requests and delivering final year-end financial statements to the external auditors, allowing the controller to concentrate on advancing the implementation.

The Results

• Brought structure to a stalled, unmanaged implementation by building a comprehensive project framework from scratch, including stakeholder accountability, milestone tracking, dependency mapping, and issues management where none had existed.
• Identified and resolved critical data integrity gaps between systems before go-live, reducing the risk of inaccurate financial reporting and downstream accounting errors.
• Led a mid-engagement inventory platform evaluation and transition after identifying that the original solution was not operationally viable for bakery locations, resulting in a better fit for field staff without disrupting commissary operations.
• Improved AP accuracy by designing a cross-referencing workflow to flag discrepancies in receipted quantities and pricing before they reached the general ledger.
• Validated sales data integration into the company’s ERP, improving completeness and accuracy of weekly sales and deposit reporting across all locations.
• Assumed full ownership of the FY24 audit, enabling the controller to stay focused on system implementation and freeing the VP of Finance to prioritize budgeting and forecasting.
• Successfully transitioned all retail locations onto a new point-of-sale system and stood up enterprise inventory management across both bakery and commissary locations, establishing the operational foundation for continued nationwide expansion.