Tag Archives: Hands
Global Food Solutions Puts Affordable, Nutritious Meals in the Hands of U.S. Students

Posted by Hayley Null, industry marketing lead manufacturing, food and beverage
Opportunity and challenge often go hand-in-hand — just ask Global Food Solutions. The Hauppage, N.Y.-based food distributor found itself at the crux of enormous opportunity a decade ago when the Obama Administration tightened school food regulations for the first time in a generation.
CEO Michael Levine saw an opening to take Global Food Solutions—then a young regional company looking to make waves with a healthy, sustainable approach to mass food production—to a new level. Levine knew that the big names in the space, companies like General Mills, Kellogg’s and Marriott, weren’t prepared for the changes that were coming.
“There was this massive demand that was about to hit the marketplace for better nutrition products on a massive scale for the school food service industry,” said Levine. “We saw this as a very unique opportunity to capitalize.”
So Global Food Solutions pounced. It started adding items to its list of product SKUs, adding school districts, and forming relationships with more distribution partners. Over the next several years, it found itself expanding across the country, and today it provides lunches for more than 5,000 schools, most located in underprivileged urban areas where student lunches are subsidized by the federal government.
Growth Breeds Complexity
But as the company grew, and its business became increasingly complex, its backend systems were not up to the task. It had been relying on a combination of QuickBooks and Excel spreadsheet to manage financials, and Global Food Solutions’ growth exposed the limitations of that setup.
“We had these pockets of software that were doing specific tasks in the business for us, but none of them were talking to each other. It was okay when we only had a handful of SKUs and it was one manufacturer and we were only shipping in one state and it was very controlled,” Levine said. “But as we expanded our model, we began to push these systems to — actually, not to, but well beyond — a breaking point.”
The problems this created were ubiquitous. The company had distribution challenges; it struggled to track inventory; and its workflow from orders to customer service were choppy and disconnected. Levine recalls the company having to put band-aids on multiple areas where the siloed systems couldn’t keep up with the business.
“It absolutely was not going to be a sustainable solution by any means,” he said. “It was almost kind of running away from us, and we needed to find a way to get a handle on it because we knew that we couldn’t scale to the next level and do all of the things we wanted to do without the right software provider and the right services.”
The Search for an Answer
Finally, in early 2018, Global Food Solutions began to search for a solution that would help the company bring all of those pieces together. It looked at several options, including a newer QuickBooks Premier product and SAP for Wholesale Distribution Products. Ultimately, however, it turned to NetSuite, not only because of its current capabilities, but the flexibility it would offer going forward.
This was critical, Levine said, because the business was looking at doing some new things. For example, it wanted to create a workflow that would support the assembly of meal kits, which would require multiple components of the business to be tightly integrated. Those kits would be delivered complete and handed out as after school snacks for economically disadvantaged students who might not have other snack options presented to them.
“The NetSuite system was able to do those things with ease,” said Levine. “It’s built in a way that is ready to expand with us as we get there. The other software companies that we evaluated, they were just not able to do that.”
With SuiteSuccess, Global Food Solutions worked closely with NetSuite and had its system deployed and live in 85 days, allowing it to work with the system before the start of the following school year. Levine said the NetSuite Professional Services team made a number of recommendations throughout the implementation process that have really helped the business take full advantage of the technology.
Swift Results
In the short time the company’s been on NetSuite, it has already seen significant improvements. The company has cut the time it takes to receive an order, create a PO and confirm with vendors by 75%. For the first time, it has clear visibility into inventory, with data delivered in clear dashboard reports. And because its data is in a single system, Global Food Solutions has cut the time it takes to resolve simple customer inquiries that once took up to 30 minutes to mere seconds.
“It’s just amazing how we feel we’re able to get so much more time back to focus on growth and creation for our business and not worrying about things being wrong,” said Levine.
NetSuite also enables Global Food Solutions to achieve the scale needed to serve so many lunches despite having just 20 employees. The company relies on manufacturing partners for production and for tapping into their buying power to purchase ingredients, and also works with a network of distribution partners.
NetSuite has become the secret ingredient to making Global Food Solutions’ network work together seamlessly. It’s integrated with the company’s CRM, enabling emails to be easily attached to customer records, and is exploring an integration with Box to bring more data into view.
Far From Done
Much more is on the horizon. The company plans to tap NetSuite’s ability to bring automation into its workflow process. It wants to expand upon its demand forecast and planning capabilities, set up auto-generated purchase orders that would maintain stock levels. It also is looking to integrate with NetSuite partner Tesorio, which will help it improve its management of cashflow and receivables.
For now, however, Levine is simply enjoying the contrast between the past experience of running the business on disconnected, stitched together components, and enjoying the integrated, data-rich environment NetSuite has enabled.
Said Levine: “It has been an incredible breath of fresh air.”
by NetSuite filed under
tastefullyoffensive:by Wrong Hands
NetSuite for iPhone Mobile App Puts Mission Critical Business Processes in the Hands and on the Wrists of On-the-Go Professionals
Posted by Malin Huffman, Senior Director of Product Management, NetSuite
Have you ever needed to quickly access key business data right before going into a meeting with a client? If you have found yourself in that situation, not only are you a prisoner to the software systems that you use (good luck if you use on-premise software), but you can also be limited by the amount and type of information they make available on mobile. With the latest NetSuite for iPhone mobile application, we aimed to empower on-the-go professionals with the business data and critical business processes to boost productivity and increase efficiency at any time, wherever their business takes them, all from their iPhone or Apple Watch.
NetSuite’s mobile application provides more than just simple notifications, it can alert users to important business events and trends, and access to the business’ system of record. They can approve purchase orders or expense reports, monitor status of key customers or prospects, view orders, transactions and more. Whether they are logged into the NetSuite mobile application or not, users across all roles can pre-set the application to receive push notifications (on your iPhone or Apple Watch) with the information relevant to their roles, when they need it. With quick configuration, businesses can extend their existing NetSuite saved searches to alert individual users or pre-defined groups of key business events directly on their Apple device, and the mobile application supports your NetSuite customizations, so company-specific data stored in custom fields or scripted business logic applied to your transactions are always accessible.
NetSuite for iPhone supports multiple roles across multiple industries. For example:
- Sales managers can be alerted to which prospects their sales team has contacted in a given week or when a key customer may need extra attention.
- Managers can be alerted to, and then help resolve escalated support cases and access all information about a specific customer directly from their Apple device.
- Warehouse staff can be alerted when inventory falls below a predefined threshold and renew orders no matter where they are.
- CFOs can get instant notifications alerting them to significant changes in cash balances or capital requests.
- Manufacturing professionals can be alerted to disruptions in the supply chain or order process and react accordingly.
- Retail professionals get instant insight into stockout risks, results of ongoing promotions or manage inventory across locations.
So if you are a NetSuite user with an iPhone and have yet to download the NetSuite mobile application, you need to do so today. It can not only provide important notifications, but a plethora of other benefits based on your role. Download the NetSuite for iPhone mobile application here.
Free dashDB and DB2 on Cloud Hands on Workshop at IDUG in Dublin
Next week I’m off to Dublin to take part in one of my favorite annual conferences; the IDUG EMEA DB2 Technical Conference. It’s always full of great user sessions as well as sessions from some of the top DB2 experts from IBM.
This year I will be delivering a 4 hours hands on workshop on Thursday afternoon covering DB2 on Cloud, dashDB and more. The best part is it is included with your conference registration so come out and get some hands on experience with running DB2 in the Cloud.
I will cover Cloud 101 including infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, DB2 on Cloud, dashDB, DataWorks, Watson Analytics and more. If you don’t know what some of these are, don’t worry, that’s what the class is all about. The good news is you already know more about these products than you might think because DB2 is under the covers of many of them. We will talk about how to get data efficiently into the cloud, cloud security, how to manage DB2 and dashDB in the cloud (and what you don’t have to manage because some of these are managed services in the cloud).
Tell you friends who are going to pencil this session in and bring a laptop (or you can even run most of the class from an iPad – it is all on the cloud afterall).
If you are attending, register for cloud accounts in advance and it will save you some time at the start of the class.
Bluemix account
- Register for free trial account at https://console.ng.bluemix.net
- Click on either “Sign up” or “Get started free”
- Requires IBM ID (one will be created if you don’t already have one)
Cloudant account
Watson Analytics account (optional)
a Caddyshack candidacy: Trump Nationalism, its short putts in small hands

more than a long drive from Reagan National Airport
Gonna be winning for The Donald, regardless of the 8 November outcome.

The Trump brand will benefit, and his global legacy has already been assured, even in its vulgarity. All Trump golf courses are branded “National”, so Trump First is inevitably America First, and as we’ve seen, America Frist, with so much ignorance and intercessory stupidity from Birtherism to Islamophobia.
Gonna be a bumpy ride for the nativist mash-up of America First fascism and brand theory(sic)
Turning his attention to Mr. Rubio, whom he calls “Little Marco,” Mr. Trump spelled out his preferred nickname: “L-I-D-D-L-E. Liddle, Liddle, Liddle Marco.”
“You know, you have to brand people a certain way when they’re your opponents,” Mr. Trump said, before relishing in perhaps his most devastating description of this election cycle — calling Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, “low energy.”
“Like Jeb Bush — we call him low energy, low energy,” he continued. “And I don’t care talking badly about him. He spent $ 29 million in negatives on me, $ 29 million. Can you believe it? Of other people’s money. Of his lobbyist and his special interest money.”
The Dart of the Eel
Finally, Mr. Trump concluded his education interlude.
“Now,” he finished with a flourish, as the crowd roared, “Trump is favored.”

What can marketing and communications professionals learn from all of this? Without advocating for or against any position or candidate, campaign watchers can all learn from (and be entertained by) brand lessons gleaned from Trump’s candidacy.1) Define your narrative or someone else will
2) The importance of being authentic to your brand
3) Don’t try to mimic other brands
4) Once you find your voice, people pay attention
5) A good brand strategy is about inspiring the future, not reliving the past
6) Don’t over-extrapolate short-term success in niche markets by projecting it onto the broader market
7) A successful brand is usually measured by its staying power with the customers who matter most
8) Know when to exit an unfavorable market

