Pack’n Fresh, a food packaging small business, experienced rapid growth in 2020 at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. But with information scattered across multiple data sources and spreadsheets, and inconsistent data clogging their systems, Pack’n Fresh leaders struggled to make timely inventory and ordering decisions to scale with the rising demand. To solve this challenge, Pack’n Fresh sought the help of Microsoft partners Power Central and Ingram Micro Cloud to deploy a unified enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that would allow it to seamlessly manage all its business functions from a single platform.
By customizing Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central to fit the specific needs of food and beverage packaging, and building actionable intelligence via Power BI and Azure Machine Learning, Ingram Micro Cloud and Power Central enabled Pack’n Fresh to save considerable time during data analysis and planning, and reallocate precious resources toward strategy and growth.
Texas-based food packaging company, Pack’n Fresh, grew up to 50 percent month-over-month in the early days of the pandemic. As a small business, Pack’n Fresh relied on the tiresome analysis of multiple spreadsheets and Quickbooks, error-prone manual data entry, and its CEO having to juggle data from several departments. Stringent Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and FDA Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) requirements presented additional hurdles for the Pack’n Fresh team. With the sudden uptick in growth, Pack’n Fresh needed a solution that could scale with demand and free its leaders to pursue success they could sustain.
Pack’n Fresh partnered with Power Central and Ingram Micro Cloud to take its systems to the next level, and the first phase was tackling the company’s scattered data. Pack’n Fresh served forty brands with over 1,000 products and 60 global vendors—each manually tracked to coordinate shipping, receiving, accounting, and production. In addition, the 1,050 actual products that Pack’n Fresh supported had become over 7,000 stock keeping units (SKUs) in its various systems due to duplication, inconsistent staffing, and error-ridden manual entry. In short, existing systems were too time-consuming for the Pack’n Fresh team to use effectively, and their clumsy tracking capabilities put the company in risk of not being compliant with FDA requirements.
After a high-level review of these data concerns, Power Central and Ingram Micro Cloud leveraged artificial intelligence (AI)—via Microsoft Azure Machine Learning services and Power BI—to de-dupe the data in just two weeks. Then, with data cleanup happening behind the scenes, both partners deployed Dynamics 365 Business Central in parallel. Within eight weeks, daily operations such as accounting, sales, purchasing, warehousing, and inventory management were seamlessly connected via a cloud-based system.
With the solutions up and running, Pack’n Fresh could now leverage this data to make faster and simpler financial decisions thanks to a unified, streamlined system. In addition, Power Central and Ingram Micro Cloud supported Pack’n Fresh to improve quality control, inventory tracking, and timely delivery while ensuring cash flow and profit margins. To do this, both partners introduced the On-Time Delivery Dashboard built on top of Power BI. This programming layer unburdened the Pack’n Fresh CEO from lengthy procurement and production planning sessions, which lowered time spent on tactical decision making from six hours to thirty minutes, per day.
To complete the transition, Power Central and Ingram Micro Cloud onboarded the Pack’n Fresh staff to the company’s ERP system in under a week and provided eight weeks of live support for staff to field their questions on-demand. As a result, two months after the transition, Pack’n Fresh’s customized ERP system based on Dynamics 365 Business Central generated high-quality data, effortlessly. Programmed with strategic business intelligence to do the heavy lifting, the ERP served as the single source of truth for generating reports and forecasting financial outcomes.
“Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central offered a comprehensive ERP solution to track all finance and operations functions. Pairing it with Power BI for reporting brought the CEO’s decisions down to just 20 minutes a day—from over 20 hours a week relying on spreadsheets. Support and advisory services from Ingram Micro Cloud and Microsoft technology gave us the confidence we needed to invest in additional relevant tech offerings—especially in areas where we didn’t have in-house experience.”
Vish Puttagunta, President and CTO, Power Central
As meaningful data flowed into the ERP system, Power Central and Ingram Micro Cloud turned their focus to making strategic decisions for how best to leverage advanced AI. Their ERP data revealed that 85 percent of Pack’n Fresh's revenue was driven by three primary customers, which allowed Power Central and Ingram Micro Cloud to use AI resources toward initiatives with measurable benefit, maximizing their customer’s ROI.
“Ingram Micro Cloud is a Microsoft 2020 Partner of the Year and leading global indirect provider of business applications. We’re enabling our partners to deliver a portfolio based on Microsoft Dynamics 365 cloud-based business applications to their customers. Our goal is to deliver more as a service, and we accomplish this via our market-leading enablement programs. We make it easy for Microsoft partners to deliver Dynamics 365—as well as the rest of Microsoft products—to the global SMB market.”
Mathew Batterbee, Global Senior Business Applications Business Manager, Ingram Micro Cloud
Additionally, product and sales data trends showed that resources were best spent on Pack’n Fresh’s thirty most profitable products, a dramatic reduction from the 1,050 products Pack’n Fresh previously managed. Pack’n Fresh was also able to reallocate time from the over sixty vendor relationships to just the four most key vendors contributing to the top thirty products. This approach rapidly established Pack’n Fresh’s procurement planning function without bogging down the ERP implementation with large amounts of irrelevant data.
“I built a million-dollar manufacturing business by using QuickBooks and Excel but had trouble scaling the business further. Down-to-the penny decisions were only made possible with the integrated Power BI tools within the Dynamics 365 Business Central ERP. We can now make quick, meaningful, and intelligent decisions on all fronts—such as finance, production, inventory, and procurement—with complete accounting support, including AR and AP. We are set to quadruple in 2021 because of this solution.”
Tariq Usmani, CEO, Pack'n Fresh
With its intelligent Microsoft Dynamics 365-based ERP, Pack’n Fresh can not only keep up with its current demand, but now has a robust system to support data-backed decisions for future growth. The Pack’n Fresh ERP was customized with the food industry in mind and allowed its teams to meet FDA and FSMA requirements seamlessly. With a focused portfolio of thirty highly profitable products and comprehensive business intelligence tools to pave the way, Pack’n Fresh has sealed the deal for rapid growth in the future.
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