Download PDF
Colgin Smokes the Competition With Sage 100 ERP
Technology Category
- Functional Applications - Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP)
Applicable Industries
- Food & Beverage
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Sales & Marketing
Use Cases
- Inventory Management
- Supply Chain Visibility
Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
Two years ago, Kerry Thornhill joined Colgin as CEO and vice president of marketing with a clear and ambitious vision. He wanted to transform the company’s perceived image in the retail trade from a small mom-and-pop operation to a large, dynamic, manufacturing firm. He dreamed of setting Colgin apart from the competition through technological sophistication and possibly even expanding to international markets. This would require embracing the latest software available at all levels so that Colgin could deliver added value to its customers. At the same time Thornhill hoped to improve communications with retail channels and offer all the services of a larger firm, including 24-hour customer support and service, seven days a week. With fewer than 20 employees, this was next to impossible using traditional methods.
About The Customer
The Colgin Companies have been in operation since 1943, offering a unique product, Colgin Liquid Smoke, to consumers. This product provides a rich barbecue taste and smell without the need for outdoor cooking. The company offers four different flavors of this product in grocery stores across the country. In addition to this, Colgin also offers two topical bug bite relief ointments, as well as Next Generation, a product for washing fresh fruits and vegetables. The company is based in Dallas, Texas, and operates from a single location. Despite having fewer than 20 employees, Colgin has a significant presence in the retail trade, with its products being available in major stores like Safeway and Albertson’s.
The Solution
Colgin’s software consultants suggested adding the eBusiness Manager module to the existing Sage 100 ERP system that the company had been using to manage its financial systems. This module would enhance the existing system and serve as a business-to-business gateway for e-commerce. With the implementation of eBusiness Manager, customers can go online to check product prices or place orders. They can verify the status of open orders and make changes virtually any time of the day or night. It’s also possible for customers to confirm scheduled shipping dates and view several years of past sales history, all with the click of a mouse. This has streamlined communication and reduced the time Colgin employees must spend on the telephone, freeing up staff members to perform other tasks.
Operational Impact
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
The Kellogg Company
Kellogg keeps a close eye on its trade spend, analyzing large volumes of data and running complex simulations to predict which promotional activities will be the most effective. Kellogg needed to decrease the trade spend but its traditional relational database on premises could not keep up with the pace of demand.
Case Study
HEINEKEN Uses the Cloud to Reach 10.5 Million Consumers
For 2012 campaign, the Bond promotion, it planned to launch the campaign at the same time everywhere on the planet. That created unprecedented challenges for HEINEKEN—nowhere more so than in its technology operation. The primary digital content for the campaign was a 100-megabyte movie that had to play flawlessly for millions of viewers worldwide. After all, Bond never fails. No one was going to tolerate a technology failure that might bruise his brand.Previously, HEINEKEN had supported digital media at its outsourced datacenter. But that datacenter lacked the computing resources HEINEKEN needed, and building them—especially to support peak traffic that would total millions of simultaneous hits—would have been both time-consuming and expensive. Nor would it have provided the geographic reach that HEINEKEN needed to minimize latency worldwide.
Case Study
Energy Management System at Sugar Industry
The company wanted to use the information from the system to claim under the renewable energy certificate scheme. The benefit to the company under the renewable energy certificates is Rs 75 million a year. To enable the above, an end-to-end solution for load monitoring, consumption monitoring, online data monitoring, automatic meter data acquisition which can be exported to SAP and other applications is required.
Case Study
Coca Cola Swaziland Conco Case Study
Coco Cola Swaziland, South Africa would like to find a solution that would enable the following results: - Reduce energy consumption by 20% in one year. - Formulate a series of strategic initiatives that would enlist the commitment of corporate management and create employee awareness while helping meet departmental targets and investing in tools that assist with energy management. - Formulate a series of tactical initiatives that would optimize energy usage on the shop floor. These would include charging forklifts and running cold rooms only during off-peak periods, running the dust extractors only during working hours and basing lights and air-conditioning on someone’s presence. - Increase visibility into the factory and other processes. - Enable limited, non-intrusive control functions for certain processes.
Case Study
Temperature Monitoring for Restaurant Food Storage
When it came to implementing a solution, Mr. Nesbitt had an idea of what functionality that he wanted. Although not mandated by Health Canada, Mr. Nesbitt wanted to ensure quality control issues met the highest possible standards as part of his commitment to top-of-class food services. This wish list included an easy-to use temperature-monitoring system that could provide a visible display of the temperatures of all of his refrigerators and freezers, including historical information so that he could review the performance of his equipment. It also had to provide alert notification (but email alerts and SMS text message alerts) to alert key staff in the event that a cooling system was exceeding pre-set warning limits.
Case Study
Coca-Cola Refreshments, U.S.
Coca-Cola Refreshments owns and manages Coca-Cola branded refrigerators in retail establishments. Legacy systems were used to locate equipment information by logging onto multiple servers which took up to 8 hours to update information on 30-40 units. The company had no overall visibility into equipment status or maintenance history.
