Softengine News is dedicated to keeping you up to date with the latest information regarding SAP Business One systems, Softengine solutions and Best Business Practices.
Are You a Best-Run Business?
Customer Success Story – Trudeau Food Distributing
Trudeau Distributing Company understood that to continue its growth from an entrepreneurial organization to a middle market company, it needed an IT system change. The company’s 60 employees were relying on homegrown software supported by one person to meet their increasing and often urgent demands for information. That's when Trudeau, a leading independent distributor of specialty food products, turned to the SAP® Business One application.
SAP Business One is an affordable and integrated business management solution designed specifically for small and midsize businesses. Trudeau uses the SAP software across its operations – from financials through sales, purchasing, inventory control, logistics, and reporting. Orders from its 950 customers come in via phone, fax, and e-mail, and from remote transmission to SAP Business One from in-store product scans. Order processors use the software to check credit and apply any special or promotional pricing. The orders are picked from the warehouse for same-day shipping and delivered by the company's own fleet of 22 trucks; dispatchers use the software’s route planning and optimization functionality to plot the most efficient truckload and delivery strategy.
Information now flows as smoothly as company operations. ”We are able to determine the manufacturing costs for each one of our products,” says Jason Dugan, Trudeau’s CFO. ”We can view sales by product, customer, and any number of parameters. We can calculate the gross margins and profitability of each delivery route. I can run a report at any time showing my raw material costs – what has gone up and what has gone down – to determine whether we should increase the price on finished goods because the input price from one of our 450 suppliers has changed. This is real information that has allowed us to negotiate more effectively with customers and vendors.”
Best of all, Trudeau employees can get this information themselves. ”The SAP Business One application’s flexibility enables people to get whatever data they want on their own,” says Annette Mitchell, business analyst at Trudeau. ”For example, we have a sales manager right now that will just do the reports himself. In fact, we no longer need an IT department. That is huge.”
These and other efficiencies have enabled Trudeau to free up capital for further expansion. Says Dugan, ”We’ve reduced inventory by 25%, because we were able to order items more efficiently. And this allowed us to lower headcount and reduce overtime. Altogether, these savings have increased our cash flow and have provided us with the working capital that will allow us to grow.”
It helped that Trudeau's implementation partner and SAP gold partner, Softengine Inc., offered an industry extension to SAP Business One – called Food One. The solution provides industry must-haves like catch weights, which enable companies to track both cases and individual unit weights; flexible route-management tools to adapt truck routes to daily order changes; and order guides, which are automatically generated lists of items that customers have ordered over the past 60 days. This helps to simplify order taking and enhance cross-selling and up-selling opportunities.
”Softengine has been a key contributor to our rollout of SAP Business One," Dugan says. "The company’s consultants were excellent and helped ensure that we had a successful implementation. Softengine responded immediately to questions and issues as they occurred, and we experienced no reduction in service levels after going live. We are looking forward to a long-term relationship with Softengine."
Spotlight on a Partner – California Manufacturing Technology Consultants (CMTC)
Whether your company has 5 or 500 employees, CMTC can provide consulting services to address challenges throughout your organization and supply chain. CMTC experienced consultants understand the organizational, process and systems changes required to effectively implement and sustain improvements. Using the 3 Dimensional Power™ consulting principles of Credibility, Comprehensiveness and Commitment insures that CMTC will ”Exceed your Expectations”.
Please contact Softengine to determine if your organization qualifies for US Dept. of Commerce subsidy on IT related services.
