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The Chefs’ Warehouse: Serving up the right ingredients to facilitate growth
Technology Category
- Functional Applications - Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP)
Applicable Industries
- Food & Beverage
Applicable Functions
- Logistics & Transportation
Use Cases
- Inventory Management
- Supply Chain Visibility
Services
- System Integration
- Training
The Challenge
The Chefs’ Warehouse, a specialty food distributor, was facing challenges in integrating new foodservice businesses rapidly and meeting the company’s high service, payment, and on-time delivery standards. The company had several ERP and best-of-breed solutions in place, but they were not sufficient to support the company's growth strategy. The company needed a solution that would provide visibility to inventory management, financial integration, process automation, and improvements for operating business units.
About The Customer
The Chefs’ Warehouse is a specialty food distributor with over 30 years of experience sourcing quality products for high-end chefs. The company operates in major metropolitan areas across the United States and Canada, supplying the finest restaurants, hotels, caterers, and gourmet stores in North America. In the highly cost-conscious restaurant trade, outstanding service is a key differentiator for The Chefs’ Warehouse. This means knowing which of almost 28,000 products it has in stock, and delivering stock to chefs reliably and promptly – as they may have hungry diners waiting.
The Solution
The Chefs’ Warehouse implemented Oracle JD Edwards Enterprise One, a solution recommended by IBM. The solution was designed to suit the future business model of the company. The project aimed to enable the integration of new acquisitions and facilitate The Chefs’ Warehouse’s organic growth more effectively by transitioning them to the standard JD Edwards platform rapidly and easily. This would provide enterprise-level visibility of inventory across the entire family of companies. The project started by migrating business units in the Southeast, then the West Coast to the core financials and distribution modules. For those units already operating JD Edwards solutions, the migration included renumbering the Chart of Accounts. Additionally, IBM provided assistance with system configuration and optimization, application performance, and the technical services required for installation and deployment.
Operational Impact
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