Gourmet Foods Dishes Up Fresh Fare Using Microsoft Navision
National Manufacturer and Distributor of Gourmet Cuisine In Their 4th Year on Navision
A leading producer of handcrafted specialty food items, Gourmet Foods supplies some of America’s finest hotels, restaurants, clubs, caterers and corporate cafeterias with premium products developed by a staff of European-trained professional chefs. If you fly first class, business class or order specialty meals on airlines around the world, you may be enjoying one of Gourmet Foods’ creations.
From their gourmet appetizers and pates to their handmade sushi and canapés, Gourmet Foods aims to provide their over 3000 customers with a wide variety of timeless classics to imaginative contemporary creations. And, much like their Navision solution, they partner with some customers to develop unique “custom made” items specific to their individual needs.
Prior to 2001, Gourmet Foods was on a DOS-based system that covered Inventory, Sales and General Ledger, with no manufacturing capability. On top of that, the software company sold off its product and closed it doors, which meant no on-going support for a system riddled with bugs.
How did Gourmet Foods jump into the software selection process? They dove in head first, that’s how. Gourmet Foods Chief Financial Officer Gary David, and their Controller/MIS Director Karen McCullough, attended an IT fair for manufacturing software. During the 2-day event, they were able to gain some exposure to 24 different applications, and were quickly able to narrow it down to six.
Of these final six, which included Navision, Gourmet Foods conducted stringent site visits to reference customers and required only one “simple” thing for their live demos: take our data and show us the entire process from buying ingredients and inputting recipes, to producing, selling and shipping the items out the door. Only two software packages survived that challenge, Expandable Software and Navision. In the end, the results were unanimous. The entire management team selected Navision hands down. As Gary David pointed out, “this was important because it meant there would be no backing away. Everyone agreed on Navision.” With everyone at Gourmet Foods now having skin-in-the-game, they embarked upon what Gary described as “one of the smoothest conversions I, or anyone at this company, had ever been through. We had far less aggravation than we ever would have imagined.”
The 50-user system was implemented on-time and in-budget, and once up and running – after all the hype and high expectations on Navision’s incredible flexibility and robust functionality – Gourmet Foods could really see what they were in for. “One of the great things is that the product delivered,” remarked Gary David. “Any mishap or hiccup that occurred was dealt with promptly and professionally by SCS. The guys are extremely knowledgeable. In fact, they deflected a lot of problems just by anticipating situations,” he added.
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At the top of the list were Don Saito – currently SCS Vice President of Operations – SCS Project Manager Larry Drewry, and SCS Senior Developer Brian Piper. “Brian is exceptional,” remarked Karen McCullough, “he doesn’t just fix an issue, he uses it as an opportunity to instruct.” This has a lot to do with how Karen, with only a day or two of formal training, has been able to dig into Navision, creating tables and reports, adding fields and other modifications. Karen created Buying Guides and Selling Guides in Navision which isolate items bought from or sold to a particular vendor or customer, reducing the time it takes to place orders. “I have worked with a number of systems over the years – Platinum, AccPac, PowerFlex and others – and Navision has been the best. It is far and away the most user friendly, intuitive and powerful system I have seen.”
Among the benefits and cost/time savings of their Navision system, Gary David pointed out a few of the top ones. Gourmet Foods, with plants in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York, and Sales and Distribution offices in Denver, Phoenix, Las Vegas and Dallas, operates as separate companies. Since these companies trade with each other on a regular basis, they have designed their Navision system so that when inter-branch PO’s are entered, the corresponding sales order is automatically recorded by the branch selling the goods.
Additionally, Gourmet Foods has been able to replace many manual processes in the manufacturing area, such as production order scheduling, which has resulted in an estimated time savings of 10 man-hours per day.
Another feature of the Gourmet Foods solution that has met with a great deal of success is the handheld mobile devices used by the sales team to track sales statistics, information that is synched daily with Navision. With this information, sales productivity is easily tracked and measured for a number of indicators. Management can readily monitor performance and make decisions based on accurate statistics.
Finally, one of Karen McCullough’s system additions: a product catalogue for customers developed by downloading product photos to the item card, filtering the file, and printing the formatted photos and selected item card data. “It helps identify what the item is since we use different names in production than the customer uses, for example,” stated Karen.
And the future for Gourmet Foods? After three and half years, Karen McCullough still boasts “there is nothing we want the system to do that it can’t do. It is unbelievably stable.” Navision has a true advocate in Karen. “If I ever leave here, I will only work for a company that has Navision,” she stated.
It looks like Gourmet Foods will be an SCS and Navision customer for a long time to come.