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
Look ma, no hands!
About Krisgo
I’m a mom, that has worn many different hats in this life; from scout leader, camp craft teacher, parents group president, colorguard coach, member of the community band, stay-at-home-mom to full time worker, I’ve done it all– almost! I still love learning new things, especially creating and cooking. Most of all I love to laugh! Thanks for visiting – come back soon 
He’s got their whole world in his hands
About Krisgo
I’m a mom, that has worn many different hats in this life; from scout leader, camp craft teacher, parents group president, colorguard coach, member of the community band, stay-at-home-mom to full time worker, I’ve done it all– almost! I still love learning new things, especially creating and cooking. Most of all I love to laugh! Thanks for visiting – come back soon
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.
Embedded reporting, BI put analytics data in business users' hands
Until mid-2015, Urban Airship Inc. was sitting on a ton of data that wasn’t always being put to good use. Then Neel Banerjee, a product manager at the mobile app engagement software vendor, decided it was time to change things.
Urban Airship’s platform helps retailers, media organizations and other businesses send interactive notifications and marketing messages to app users. The Portland, Ore., company stores data it collects on user interactions with apps in a cloud-based Amazon Redshift data warehouse for analyzing and rating the performance of different notifications. But Banerjee realized that more could be done with the interaction data — so, he worked to develop an embedded reporting tool that gives Urban Airship’s customers access to the information.
Marketers use a web application to schedule notifications and manage other user engagement tasks. Now they can also view reports about the use of their apps and the performance of their marketing campaigns in embedded dashboards. In addition, they can drill down into the data and browse through it on their own to assess what’s performing well, and why.
Banerjee said those kinds of data analytics capabilities are becoming more and more an expectation among Urban Airship’s clients.
“These marketing teams are becoming more data driven and they’re becoming more sophisticated,” he said. “What becomes important [to them] is having user-level data. There was a market need of people who are asking these really specific questions.”
Value-added potential in embedded tools
Embedded business intelligence (BI) and reporting is a popular option for companies like Urban Airship that are looking to increase the value of existing applications or monetize their data by creating new products and services built around analytics capabilities.
Close to 70% of the 1,524 respondents to a survey conducted this year by research firm Dresner Advisory Services LLC said embedded BI was either important, very important or critical to their business. That ranked embedded BI 12th for strategic importance out of 30 analytics technologies the respondents were asked about, according to Dresner’s 2016 Wisdom of Crowds Business Intelligence Market Study report.
Banerjee and his team built the customer dashboards using embedded BI software from Looker Data Sciences. The dashboards are tailored to specific industries, he said. For example, one dashboard for online retailers shows stats on products that shoppers are browsing, adding to their cart and buying via a mobile app. Another dashboard for media companies shows what type of content is being browsed, read and shared.
For Banerjee, the embedded reporting tool is also a way of staying ahead of the competition by offering a value-added service to customers. “It was driven by the fact that we thought this was a unique thing,” he said.
MasterControl Inc. is another software vendor that’s big on embedded BI. For more than a decade, the Salt Lake City company has embedded a homegrown analytics tool into its enterprise quality management software, which automates document management and other processes as part of regulatory compliance and manufacturing quality assurance initiatives. Now it’s working to replace its custom analytics technology with JReport, an embedded reporting and BI tool from Jinfonet Software.
Matt Lowe, MasterControl’s executive vice president, said virtually all of the company’s 1,000-plus customers use the homegrown tool to analyze corporate quality trends both internally and at their supply chain business partners. When MasterControl first developed the analytics tool, commercial BI software “was either super-heavy and difficult to use or too lightweight to do what we needed,” Lowe said.
But that’s no longer the case, he added. He also said it will be easier for customers to link JReport to their corporate BI systems to support higher-level analytics applications combining the quality data with information from ERP and customer relationship management systems. Only about 10% have such linkages now, according to Lowe, who said the switch to JReport is due to be completed later this year or in early 2017.
Inside job for embedded BI
Embedded analytics applications don’t have to serve external users only. Businesses can also use them to improve internal operations by giving employees access to information when and where they need it.
For example, Clover Health, an insurance company that is offering Medicare Advantage plans initially in New Jersey, has developed a web application that gives its visiting nurse practitioners access to embedded reports on how likely patients are to develop health complications. That helps them make instant decisions about how to care for patients during home visits, said Otis Anderson, director of analytics at the insurer, which is based in San Francisco.
Clover’s team of data scientists analyzes data from insurance claims, lab results, electronic health records and nurses’ notes using a tool from Mode Analytics, then exports the analytics results to the web application, which the nurse practitioners can access while in the field.
Anderson said the embedded reporting functionality takes data analysis out of Clover’s boardroom and pushes it to the operational front lines. The potential business impact of analytics “is not just on high-level, strategic things,” he said. “On the day-to-day things, that’s really where a good data tool can help your organization.”
Executive editor Craig Stedman contributed to this story.
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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.”
one pharoah’s pyramid scheme: electing a brand or branding an electorateWhat 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
yelling at the public sphere
Hadoop’s Adolescence: It’s In Our Hands
The Strata + Hadoop World conference kicked off in San Jose on Tuesday with an excellent slate of keynote presentations, as always. Doug Cutting, advocate and creator of open-source technologies including Hadoop, and Cloudera’s Chief Architect, led the way with his reflections on the first 10 years of Apache Hadoop. Much of his talk focused on the third pillar of Hadoop – the first being the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), the second – Apache YARN, and the third, the Community.
While much has been made over the past year of Spark overtaking MapReduce – and everyone believes the same will happen to Spark over time – Cutting pointed out that this evolution doesn’t threaten the definition of “Hadoop.” Rather, the lasting legacy of Hadoop is the very process of the community coming together to create new and improved components of the technology stack.
Looking forward to the next 10 years, Cutting believes the biggest changes will come from the community and the applications we create to solve diverse challenges and seize new opportunities. If anyone needed proof, the speakers who followed him on stage offered great examples. In an inspirational presentation, Megan Price, Executive Director at the Human Rights Data Analysis Group, demonstrated how machine-learning methods can be applied to questions about conflict violence – specifically in Syria. At the other end of the spectrum, Bruce Andrews, the Deputy Secretary of Commerce for the US Department of Commerce discussed his agency’s efforts to make all the data they collect available to us all to fuel innovation that helps to drive the economic engine.
As an active member and contributor in the open source community, our Syncsort Big Data team is excited to work with our partners and customers to shape what the next 10 years of Hadoop will deliver to the world.
If you want to learn more about the themes at Strata and how Syncsort is working to help shape Hadoop’s future, watch the appearance on SiliconANGLE TV’s theCUBE by Tendü Yoğurtçu, General Manager for our Big Data business that also took place yesterday during Strata.