Georgia-based premier food processing company extends reporting and analytics in Dynamics NAV with BI4Dynamics, for better insights into sales, customers, and product mix.
CLIENT:
Suzanna’s Kitchen
INDUSTRY:
Food Processing/Manufacturing
Company:
Suzanna’s Kitchen, Inc. produces food products and offers beef steaks, chicken, pork barbecue, chili, corndogs, patties, crumbles, and other prepared meat products. Suzanna’s Kitchen distributes its products to restaurants, schools, cafeterias, and convenient stores in the United States. The company prospers through a combination of insight and innovation. Suzanna’s was one of the first U.S. companies to develop an automated hand-forming process for beef products for national restaurant chains. Today, the company’s computerized barbecue line is the envy of larger competitors.
The Situation:
Suzanna’s Kitchen uses JustFood ERP™ and Microsoft Dynamics™ NAV for accounting, enterprise resource planning, sales, inventory management, and financial reporting, but needed a BI tool to help with advanced reporting.
“We needed a business intelligence tool to help us analyze profit margins and growth, as well as perform ‘what-if’ analysis. BI4Dynamics was recommended to us. After reviewing the capabilities, we made the decision to implement and could not be happier with how the solution has supported our business,” Said Wayne Schuster – Chief Financial Officer, Suzanna’s Kitchen
Since starting with BI4Dynamics over 6 years ago, the executive team has realized several benefits, including the ability to consolidate and analyze sales data, analyze profit margins, review customer profitability and growth measures, drill-down into product volumes and mix analysis, and perform ‘what-if’ analysis.
Analyze Sales Mix to Increase Profits
Suzanna’s Kitchen uses BI4Dynamics to better understand their channel-customer-product mix to optimize selling the best products at the best prices using the best distribution channels.
These sales data categories include:
- Units sold (in quantities and pounds)
- Sales by margins
- Sales by price point
- Sales by distribution channel
- Sales by source
“We use the Sales dashboards in BI4Dynamics the most. They help us to analyze our profit margins by product and understand how to optimize our sales efforts to increase profits,” continued Wayne.
Analyze Customer Profitability and Growth
To stay competitive, companies must continually plan how to keep customers for longer, grow them into larger customers, make them more profitable, serve them better, and acquire more customers, and increase the life-time value. Suzanna’s Kitchen is no exception and set out to achieve this by shifting from a product-centric focus to a customer-centric focus using data and intelligence. To do this the executive team needed to move from traditional gross profit margin reporting. Using BI4Dynamics, the company is able to analyze the “bottom-half” of the income statement and the layers that exist to highlight customer-related expenses, like distribution, customer service, credit, and marketing.
Because BI4Dynamics allows for easy drill-down into dimensions and measures, the Suzanna’s Kitchen executive team can now easily analyze customer profitability and growth measures to effectively plan and grow.
Drill-Down into Product Volumes & Mix
Suzanna’s Kitchen has numerous products that each contribute in unique ways to the company’s profitability. The effects of pricing and volumes on
revenues are easily lost when reviewing overall company performance. The company needed to be able to take a deeper dive into the impact of the
individual products and overall product mix to establish and track key performance indicators.
“Using BI4Dynamics for tracking near-time data around sales, product volumes, and mix analysis, we can make informed, data-driven decisions regarding products and operational shifts.”
Wayne Schuster – Chief Financial Officer, Suzanna’s Kitchen
Fully Supported with BI4Dynamics
The Suzanna’s Kitchen ERP and Finance teams have been happy with the relationship they have built with BI4Dynamics and level of support they receive today.
“We rely heavily on BI4Dynamics. We love the solution and the customer service has been amazing.”
Alex Hernandez – IT/ ERP Specialist, Suzanna’s Kitchen.
The company plans to expand their usage of the solution by leveraging the out-of-the-box reporting available for other modules in Dynamics NAV,
including Inventory and Manufacturing. “We look forward to exploring our manufacturing data using BI4Dynamics reporting to see what insights can be revealed there,” said Wayne.
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