Sure Winner Saves Money and Speeds Transactions with Software Concepts' ERP
Problem:
In the late 1990s, Sure Winner Foods, a $70 million ice cream distributor in Saco, Maine, was selling a lot of ice cream. In fact, with products from well-known makers like Haagen-Dazs, Dove, Brigham’s and Ben & Jerry’s, demand for Sure Winner’s products was steadily rising.
But one obstacle threatened to put the company’s future growth plans on ice. The growing distributor was stymied by limitations in its key business application, a proprietary program for handling sales and financial activities.
The custom-built application, built for the old IBM System/36, just couldn’t keep up with the company’s needs. In fact, it was having a chilling effect on the firm’s ability to fill orders quickly and efficiently.
The main problems of the aging application included poor design and lack of integration. The substandard design of the code slowed performance, both in terms of the user response time and the time needed to process batch jobs. Also, the various business functions of the application were not well integrated, forcing employees to enter the same information more than once. That was not only time-consuming, requiring more employees to process transactions, but also had the potential for errors to creep into the system when data had to be entered more than once.
Solution:
Realizing that the company’s future growth required a better software system, the company investigated some of the business software packages on the market. It opted for Software Concepts DS90, a turnkey system designed specifically for small- and mid-sized businesses. The DS90 application gave Sure Winner the ERP features they needed at an affordable price, and with its inherent flexibility, the ability to be quickly customized to suit future business requirements.
“Software Concepts understands the distribution business and was able to modify the base system to meet our needs,” says Mark Irving, Technology Director for Sure Winner. “Also, they have a staff of individuals who can satisfy our needs, so we’re no longer dependent on only one or two people who know our systems.”
The implementation of the Software Concepts system went very smoothly, according to Irving.
“We knew what we were getting and how it was going to work. And Software Concepts addressed any minor issues immediately.” The new system not only provided full integration between all of the various business functions, from order entry to payment information to delivery, but also included support for PDA access and integration with the company’s locator system for warehouse management.
“Software Concepts makes it a point to test all new programs or modifications to our systems before we go live with it. This practice has made all migrations easy and painless,” notes Irving, adding that the system continues to run well and is quite stable.
The result of the migration? Sure Winner now processes up to 1,500 orders weekly, with 1½ agents. That same number of orders used to require five full-time agents to handle. The software has also enabled Sure Winner to increase its sales without incurring additional overhead costs.
“We’ve grown our business by 75% since implementing the DS90 software--without adding any administrative staff,” notes Irving.
More importantly, for the long-term success of the company, the new system has enabled Sure Winner to quickly meet the needs of its customers. And that makes for happier, more loyal customers and a growing market for Sure Winner. “Now we lead our industry in technology,” says Irving, “and we have the ability to adapt to customers’ technology changes.”
