Data Dilemma
Reser's Fine Foods, a manufacturer and distributor of high-quality refrigerated food products to the grocery and food service industries, is celebrating its 57th anniversary this year. Reser's manages more than 2000 SKUs and has six major product lines -- both branded and private label -- including prepared salads, meat products, pasta, Mexican foods, refrigerated potatoes and brokered products.
Brands include Baja Cafe, Stonemill Kitchens, Main St. Bistro and Potato Express, and can be found in stores such as Alberston's, Wal-Mart, CostCo, Kroger and others. In addition to direct shipments to customers and distributors, Reser's operates 110 company-owned route trucks for store-door delivery with local distribution centers in 14 states. Reser's is currently selling in all 50 states, Canada, Mexico and Guam.
Internal data at Reser's was extremely cumbersome to gather and organize. It comes directly from the ERP system once a product is invoiced and after the close of each month, paper reports were printed and subsequently mailed -- "snail mail" that is -- to each of regional managers across the United States.
Information was delayed two to four weeks and, of course, this made it extremely difficult to effectively manage customers and brokers. Reports were static and could not be manipulated to for desired viewing.
Reser's did not have any experience working with a sales reporting system and knew it had to seek a solution provider. The sales organization had varying technical skill levels so it was imperative to find a user-friendly tool. Jennifer Jackman, sales analyst for Reser says, "We needed a product that would seamlessly integrate within our organization."
The company selected the Discovery System from IRM. Jackman explains, "IRM's exclusive focus on the food and beverage industry, and their familiarity of the challenges facing a CPG manufacturer and distributor was a driving factor in Reser's decision to explore the possibilities of this sales reporting system. Discovery System is an easy-to-use, point and click system everyone within the sales organization at Reser's could utilize."
Lynn Stevens, director of IT for Reser's, says the implementation went very smoothly. "We already had the required data in our system -- it was the same data we used to create our monthly printed report. It was clean and we didn't have to make any system changes to create any additional data or capture anything different than what we were already," she notes.
Reser's had to design a program that would pull the data from the database and put it into the file format the sales Discovery System required, but other than that, the technical piece of the project was actually very small. "It was more of a mapping process than anything else," says Stevens. Discovery is a hosted system; Reser's simply FTPs the data to the tool and IRM takes it from there. It is a hands off, scheduled process that runs once a week.
EXPECTATIONS EXCEEDED
Since implementing the Discovery System, the sales reporting has far exceeded any expectation, indicates Jackman. Regional managers, division managers and the executive team, can now view sales data every Monday morning, which contains information through the previous Saturday. Business decisions, like SKU consolidation, discontinuations and increased distribution, can now be made using accurate, reliable and up-todate sale figures. Any internal planning will benefit from this data, says Jackman.
Since implementing the Discovery System, the sales reporting has far exceeded any expectation, indicates Jackman. Regional managers, division managers and the executive team, can now view sales data every Monday morning, which contains information through the previous Saturday. Business decisions, like SKU consolidation, discontinuations and increased distribution, can now be made using accurate, reliable and up-todate sale figures. Any internal planning will benefit from this data, says Jackman.
"Our business processes have dramatically improved since the implementation of the Discovery System. What used to take weeks to sort through now takes a few days," explains Jackman. Static data that was not available for up to a month is now available every week in a comprehensive data set that can easily be manipulated for individualized reporting needs.
The sales organization can create detailed reports, including charts, in a matter of minutes. They can build levels of hierarchies and "slice and dice" the data any way they want. Regional sales managers in the field can view individualized sales data and respond to any fluctuations within the week, as opposed to the following month as in the past. They have a better understanding of their business because the Discovery System allows them to drill down into specific customer, broker and item information. Jackman says there are literally hundreds of possibilities for manipulating the data, and it is entirely driven by the end user.
In addition, customer and broker relationships have been strengthened and regional sales brokers can now receive reports that are almost real time or at most five days out, viewing problems and leveraging opportunities. Reser's has explored the opportunity to take syndicated data and add it to the system. This may be implement in the future. //