Aptean Food & Beverage ERP Case Study: GA Foods

For more than 40 years, GA Foods has operated with a single, driving goal: providing meals to those in need, including infants and children, military personnel, disaster relief and senior citizens.

Starting from a single production facility in Florida, GA Foods has grown into an operation that proudly oversees the daily delivery of nutritious meals to seniors and children throughout Florida and Georgia, along with distributing shelf-stable products to customers in more than 40 states. The company is also a first-line meal provider whenever a natural disaster strikes.

From the complete manufacture of healthy, nutritious meals to delivery, GA Foods truly encompasses the entire length of the supply chain, all while never wavering from a mission of compassion and care.

The Challenge

GA Foods has a complex operation. Aside from manufacturing nutritious meals, the company handles logistics for 25,000 home deliveries each week, and it has a catering division that undergoes constant menu reformulations. Moreover, with a large percentage of their customers being insurance providers, the company’s expertise must extend beyond the food industry arena altogether and address the challenges of medical billing.

• Complex organization with lots of disparate systems

• Stalled growth with generic solutions

By 2013, GA Foods’ continued growth and expansion had begun to stall, and it became apparent that a significant modernization effort, both from the perspective of general business practices and the technology being used to run the company, would be necessary.

The Solution

GA Foods’ Chief Technology Officer, Andy Borgmann, instituted a number of changes, including implementation of a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) software system, allowing the company to take advantage of cutting-edge technologies and grow in the future.

Borgmann and the company’s project manager, Beth Ann Valavanis, were searching for a solution that was customizable and user-friendly, with easy access to data. They selected Aptean Food & Beverage ERP because, with its out-of-the-box industry-specific functionalities, it was more fully-featured than the other choices. In addition, Aptean’s willingness to collaborate with GA Foods to fine-tune the software according to its specific requirements was critical.

“A lot of the other vendors were really hesitant to want us to do anything custom.” explained Valavanis. “Aptean was quick to talk through some of the stuff that is very specific to our business, as well as understand the complexities that we’re dealing with.”

The Implementation

Aptean was committed to helping GA Foods implement Aptean Food & Beverage ERP within its desired timeline of eight months. Both organizations agreed upon a schedule of milestones and deadlines, and each week they met to assess progress.

Having used the legacy software at GA Foods for decades, the company’s users had a comfort level with the older program; if the ambitious go-live was to be a success, everyone would need to quickly attain a comfort level with the new software. So, to ensure the project’s success, intensive user training was performed every week. In between training sessions, users were encouraged to access the company’s sandbox environment to experiment with the new system.

The hard work put in by the collaboration of the two organizations paid off, and GA Foods was able to roll out Aptean Food & Beverage ERP on its desired go-live date.

The Results

Having a modern ERP system in place facilitated rapid growth for GA Foods while maintaining a relatively steady headcount.

• 90% revenue growth since going live with Aptean Food & Beverage ERP

• Efficiency and productivity improvements across the organization

• Increased data accuracy

Shortly after the initial go-live, it became apparent that the increase in business had a real-world impact.

“Think about having 500 sales orders a day. You don’t want to have reams and reams of paper in filing cabinets, and boxes put in warehouses,” Borgmann explains.

The OCR functionality within Microsoft Dynamics in conjunction with Aptean Food & Beverage ERP’s document basket, instead made it possible to scan documents directly into the system and automatically attach them to the corresponding sales order records in Microsoft Dynamics.

“Being able to constantly improve the process and the customization absolutely is a value of NAV, and a value of what we’ve done with the implementation with Aptean,” Borgmann concluded.

Additionally, the company has used Aptean Food & Beverage ERP to implement expiration date tracking, providing visibility to the expiration date of every lot record which ensures that only the freshest, safest food is being shipped out to customers.

While the benefits of Aptean Food & Beverage ERP are obvious from the perspective of the company’s technology, many external business processes have been improved as part of an effort to further optimize the activity within the software. GA Foods restructured its warehouse to promote efficiency in locating, moving and picking inventory to take better advantage of the warehouse management capabilities.

“The implementation forced us to get other aspects of our business in order, such as our accounts receivable team through assignments of accounts and things like that,” explains Beth Ann. “All those things beyond just the system really allowed us to position ourselves for more.”

Ready To Bite Into Big Benefits Straight Out of the Box? That’s the Aptean Advantage

With over three decades of experience in the food and beverage industry, our teams of in-house experts have developed specialized ERP software that solves your unique challenges as standard. Including functionality to master food traceability, allergen management, catch weight calculations, expiration dates, demand forecasting and so much more, our food ERP is ready to optimize daily operations and drive profitability for your business.

What’s more, it’s all backed by our dedicated support teams, offering you best practice advice, technical support and by-your-side guidance throughout implementation and beyond. And, with cloud deployment options available, you’re able to take advantage of additional benefits such as enhanced scalability, security and accessibility.

So, what’s stopping you? Contact us today to schedule your free software demonstration and see for yourself how Aptean’s food ERP can accelerate the growth of your business.