Imler's Poultry automates monthly salesperson budgeting process

The Challenge

Imler's Poultry is a dynamic growing food distribution business with 5th generation owners. They realized the current solution would not enable them to expand and grow the business. The old system lacked any capabilities for management to analyze information for making quality business decisions. It had reports but there was no ability to make new reports or use Excel to slice and dice data.

"Our old system was not very good at providing us information. The reporting was a nightmare. Our old system wasn't broken but we had big concerns that the software itself and the company supporting it could take us forward. We wanted to get into warehouse management solutions, bar coding and scanning all inbound and outbound inventory transactions and our old solution had no current or future capabilities of doing that."

"We wanted a solution that we would not outgrow and a business partner to help us utilize technology to grow our business and monitor business performance proactively". Missy Lovrich, CFO Imler's Poultry.

The Solution

"We looked at several different food distribution specific packages. There was nothing wrong with them but we had concerns that we had to travel out of state to get training and going forward we would be calling an 800 line for support. We were really looking for a local company within a couple of hours of us that we could have an on-going relationship beyond the initial install. We wanted expert advice and on-site help initially and going forward. We felt comfortable that Microsoft would be around for awhile and we would not have to change software in 5 years. The Trinity food solution gave us all the extras we needed to ensure that Dynamics was a great fit for our business. It was clear from the outset that Trinity has rich experience in this sector as they seem to have all the bases covered. Catchweights is critical to us and this was the only solution we found that provides this on Dynamics GP. But in addition Trinity enhance sales order capture, logistics, including load planning as well as many aspects of pricing.

And their consultants were always on hand throughout the implementation with advice and training where needed." Missy Lovrich, CFO Imler's Poultry.

The Benefits

• "We can access any information at a click of a mouse. Empower provided us with the tools to make our own reports and access information we never were able to do before." Missy Lovrich CFO Imler's Poultry.
• •Automatically upload and change prices in 1/2 an hour. Before it took 4 people 1/2 day to manually change prices for all items and hope they didn't make a mistake.
• "The Empower Enterprise reporting package enables Imler's management to enter budgets per week down to product level per salesman. Each salesman then gets notified each week via e-mail automatically of their actual sales compared to budget. Before that was cut and pasted into excel and took a day and it was not done until the middle of the following month. As a company and at the salesman level we are now proactive instead of reactive to changes in our business because of Empower and Dynamics GP." Missy Lovrich CFO Imler's Poultry.
• "Our salesmen get sent a report automatically via e-mail every Saturday telling them what customers and items have had a downward sales trend in the last 4 weeks. This enables them to proactively call the customer on Monday and find out if there is a problem and found out why." Bryan Imler, Director of Sales Imler's Poultry.
• Auto send customer statements and price sheets via e-mail and fax every Friday versus manually doing those procedures each week.
• Imler's is in the commodities business and prices change weekly. Orders that have been in the system that are not under contract automatically get re-priced if there are price changes.
• Implementation of a warehouse management solution for scanning to eliminate picking errors, increase speed of picking and put away.
• "We now feel we have no constraints in growing our business and utilizing technology because of Microsoft Dynamics GP and Empower Business Solutions". Missy Lovrich, CFO Imler's Poultry.

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