Challenges
Service Foods is one of New Zealand’s largest family-owned and operated food service distributors, importing products from more than 20 countries as well as sourcing 8,000+ local products. Service Foods caters to restaurants, bakeries, cafes, catering businesses and supermarkets.
Rapid business growth through diversification and acquisition had created a vast wealth of data for Service Foods. However, the company lacked an effective way to analyze the data to support further business expansion and revenue growth.
Diverse products and acquisitions
Service Food had amassed a vast amount of Excel data and proprietary report formats which were impossible to manage and analyze with existing software.
An over-customized ERP
The company’s heavily customized ERP provided no useful insight to support a strategy for growth.
Increasing staff numbers
To manage a sharp increase in staffing, management could see that a modern, scalable analytics platform that could deliver useful information as well as support the strategic business plan was an imperative.
Solutions
According to Aneil Balar, Service Foods’ Managing Director, the company had a vision for best-in-class supply chain analytics beginning with Sales, followed by Inventory Management, then Financials, and finally Vendor Management. “We knew Logility could meet our functional needs,” said Balar. “We also talked to a lot of companies that were operated from overseas, so we really liked the fact that Logility has a local presence. This meant Logility could better understand how our business worked and could provide local support.”
Balar explained that Logility’s Auckland team also understands New Zealand’s GST environment, which makes things easier.
Advanced Analytics
Inventory Planning and Optimization
Data Management
In short, Logility arrived at the right time and provided a compelling proof of concept. The Sales team was eager for new ways to analyze revenue data and market opportunities, so the implementation began there with three key staff members and was rolled out using a ‘train the trainer’ model. Since then, licenses have been rolled out to 100 users.
Results
The challenge of conquering the shortcomings of existing systems and making sense of massive amounts of data was quickly resolved with dashboards that provide a global overview of company performance. Comprehensive data related to 12,000 SKUs is now in one place and refreshed eight times daily for near real-time analysis.
What was once suspected or even known, but unmanageable — because it was unmeasurable — is now revealed in detail and can be addressed strategically. A prime example is the cost to Service Foods of selling and onboarding a new account knowing that many will never place an order. This is no longer anecdotal; the company now knows that 20 new accounts are opened in an average week and eight of them will never place an order. Another example is the ability to react to rising inventory balances for slow-moving products. No one doubted this was happening; using Logility, it can now be identified and dealt with quickly and decisively.
With Logility, Service Foods staff now talk about the same information and insight using a common vocabulary. Logility makes it easy for non-technical users to access and interpret the same information as the power users. The solution can be accessed from any device that can run a browser, and employee and customer access is carefully controlled using role-based permissions and standard industry security protocols.
With Logility, Service Foods has adopted a scalable analytics platform to support business growth. It has refined key sales metrics, consolidated data from 12,000 SKUs into a single view, automated report distribution to key stakeholders and gained critical insight to enable faster, better decision-making.
