Horizon Food Group Rising to the Top on Microsoft Dynamics NAV   

Baked Snacks Company Streamlines Operations and Grows on Dynamics NAV

Horizon Food Group, Inc. (HFG), composed of three companies: Horizon Snack Foods, Ne-Mo’s Bakery and La Tempesta Bakery Confections, is a growing $70 million specialty foods and sweet snacks business. The current subsidiaries manufacture a wide range of baked snacks that range from snack pies to muffins and cinnamon rolls to biscotti. HFG products are available nationwide under their own brand names or privately labeled at retail establishments such as Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club, major nationwide grocery chains, fast food restaurants and convenience stores, to name a few. 

HFG was running a heavily customized legacy system that was developed in-house over 20 years ago. “Our system was developed and maintained by a father and son,” commented HFG IT Manager Roger Beard. “We were starting to have problems with reliability and downtime, and they weren’t able to support the product, which left us in a bind. We were relying on one person who didn’t have any backup.” HFG President Bob Sharp echoed this sentiment adding, ”Our previous system required a programmer for every little change and fix that was needed. We needed a reliable system that wasn’t dependent on just one man.”

In addition to a stable product backed by a vendor with the financial wherewithal to maintain and develop the software, HFG has other needs due to their continued growth through acquisitions. “We really needed a system that could handle multiple locations and multiple companies for better financial management,” stated Bob. At one point, HFG had three accounting departments.  

Prior to coming to HFG, Roger Beard was a consultant who had experience with just about every major mid-range software package on the market. One of his customers was – as Roger put it – “ranting and raving” about Microsoft Dynamics NAV (then called Navision).  So HFG checked it out, and that was all she wrote.

“We were very impressed with the Dynamics NAV demo. It’s a very powerful tool, extremely flexible and the ease of customization is the best I’ve seen,” remarked Roger. “You have all the source code, so you can go in and modify the code yourself if you need to.”

Since being on Dynamics NAV, HFG has experienced tremendous efficiencies. Instead of running separate applications throughout the organization, they have streamlined operations on Dynamics NAV. “Dynamics NAV was able to handle our various pricing scenarios: contract pricing, discounts and promotions, and automate them so the order entry process was much smoother and more controlled,” stated Bob. “Now order entry personnel enter predetermined pricing schemes that make our profitability predictable.”

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The most recent HFG company that was switched to Dynamics NAV, La Tempesta, came off SysPro. It was, according to Roger, “the smoothest implementation I have ever done, and I have done many. It went remarkably well.” The implementation, from start to finish including all data conversion, took less than three months.  

One of the biggest gains was realized through an improvement made in capturing Broker commissions for the organizations representing HFG. They had a fairly complicated process that involved various commission calculations that were completed manually. These processes took an enormous amount of time for AP clerks to complete. 

In a short amount of time, SCS designed, developed and tested a system that allowed HFG’s Partner Managers to setup Brokers and their commission calculations. From that point, the system created real-time payable entries as the result of customer transactions. Furthermore, the system calculated the due date for these payable entries only when the customer invoices were paid in full. The result was a system that only required the AP clerk to run a Navision function that output the checks and reports to be sent to the Brokers. A process that once required days of work now took minutes and was much more accurate.

HFG also boasts better reporting since being on Dynamics NAV. “We’ve taken a quantum leap forward in our reporting capabilities,” stated Roger. “Access to data was virtually impossible before, but now with ODBC connectivity, we can slice and dice our data any way we want to. And Dynamics NAV’s Dimensions are a great reporting tool,” he added.

”We can now do strenuous sales reporting with the dimensions capability,” said Bob. “I can get customer, product line or channel profitability instantly in Dynamics NAV. On the manufacturing side, there have been significant improvements in routing products through the manufacturing process. The production order process to get the information to the production floor is now a reliable and consistent process.”  

“SCS’s service has been super and they have been wonderful to work with,” commented Roger. “When we have a problem, they come up with the answer, and it’s typically simple and elegant. They just get the job done without wasting our time.”

“Mike Stallman did a great job with our implementation and data conversion making for a smooth go-live. His experience helped this go extremely well for us,” Bob.

“SCS’s general knowledge of business and deep knowledge of Navision was invaluable.”