Introduction: Quality Frozen Food
Quality Frozen Foods, based in Brooklyn New York, is one of the largest kosher food distributors in the world and a leading kosher food manufacturer that manages several subsidiary brands. They have a comprehensive product list and offer a full line of frozen, refrigerated, grocery, and candy items as well as specialty items such as gluten free options. Founded in 1976, it ran as a family owned and operated ‘mom and pop’ organization until 2019 when external investors were brought in to help accelerate growth in the company. For the last 40 years Quality Frozen Food has been providing a wide range of products to both local and international clients.

Challenges: Managing Complexity
Quality Frozen Foods offers over 100 brands and 4000 individual products, with a further 1500 items available on special order. Managing the flow of inventory and ensuring that the correct order arrives at the right destination, fresh and on time is a major challenge. Before the business was bought out the entire warehouse process was completely manual, but as they brought on new investors it was clear they needed to upgrade their systems to put more uniform business processes in place and enable live data. Quality Frozen Foods needed a WMS that enabled live picking, and because of the complex local and global customer network, and the nature of their product, it was important that they had a system that could manage expiration dates and shelf-life data for all the products to ensure food safety and eliminate wastage. The first priorities were traceability, rotating stock properly, inventory visibility, and order fulfillment accuracy.

• Traceability – they needed to know where stock was and how it was moving through the warehouse.
• Stock rotation – making sure that FIFO principles are being followed and expiry dates and shelf life were being tracked and managed accordingly.
• Inventory visibility – knowing what is in stock and available makes it easier for customers to place orders.
• Fulfilment – making sure orders are fulfilled correctly with no items missing and also ensuring that all orders are accounted for and none fall through the cracks.

These were the key challenges that lead them to source a Warehouse Management System as part of their business process overhaul.

Solution: A Cohesive System
Because Quality Frozen Foods were doing everything manually, they started from a position where they did not know what they did not know. They had to build the entire system and all processes from scratch. To do this they started with implementing a SAGE ERP system.

Quality Frozen Foods brought on PC Ware as SAGE consultants to help implement the ERP system. This enabled the digitization and centralization of most of the key business processes, but the system fell short of providing visibility of the day-to-day warehouse operations. After assessing the needs of Quality Frozen Foods for a warehouse management system, PC Ware suggested GraniteWMS as a solution that would meet all their requirements. Quality Frozen Foods was making a lot of changes all at once as the new ownership came in. This meant lots of projects were happening at the same time, but GraniteWMS had worked with PC Ware on previous projects and shown they could solve the necessary challenges and integrate well with the SAGE platform.

The GraniteWMS implementation began in December of 2019, and while it was delayed several months due to COVID restrictions, it was able to go live in July of 2020. A key aspect of the solution was that the GraniteWMS team spent time with Quality Frozen Foods to fully understand their needs and make them feel confident in what the system could do. According to Jacob Soffer, Director of Operations at Quality Frozen Foods, “It was great to work with a team that not only understood computers and programming, but also could talk to you like a person and explain things very simply. The team’s specific knowledge of SAGE also enabled them to come up with better concepts. Because they knew both how SAGE works and how the business works they could put together unique and applicable solutions.” The GraniteWMS team was able to look at everything as a whole and present a concept that would work for their specific business. By looking at what Quality Frozen Foods was trying to achieve, it was possible to implement GraniteWMS into the SAGE platform in such a way that the system works as a cohesive whole.

Results: Accuracy and Visibility
After the initial installation the bulk of the GraniteWMS setup and tweaking has been completed remotely. Having a GraniteWMS team in South Africa turned out to be a huge benefit to the New York based warehouse as it was possible to get fixes and upgrades completed overnight so that they did not disrupt regular working operations during the day.

GraniteWMS enables Quality Frozen Foods to sell hundreds of products with a 30-day shelf life. Being able to easily capture and track expiry dates ensures that Quality Frozen Foods can seamlessly manage the flow of products through the warehouse and maximise product freshness. After implementing GraniteWMS, Quality Frozen Foods found they had significantly more traceability of their stock. This resulted in greater transparency and better accuracy, resulting in better management and fewer customer returns. They have also been able to set up the necessary systems to manage special orders and because it gives a complete overview of the warehouse, it is easy to communicate to customers what is in stock and available. The visibility of stock also meant that there are fewer mistakes — there are no longer typos in orders or issues with orders having incorrect or missing products. This means that when an order does go wrong, it is possible to give accurate feedback to customers about what happened. The ability to report on every transaction also means that it is easy to see what went wrong when there is something missing or incorrect in an order. It can be traced back to when or how it was picked to see why there was a breakdown in the process which can then be corrected at the source.

GraniteWMS also helped with overall warehouse productivity. By moving certain items into more convenient locations, updating picking sequences, changing layouts, and printing orders based on location, warehouse processes were optimized, saving time and energy on the warehouse floor. The more efficient processes meant that it only took 60 people to handle a workload that would have previously required 90 people. It also provides a report on user activity so that the number of orders and picks per user can be tracked and optimized. It is possible to see who is performing well and who is underperforming without having to constantly monitor employees. This also helps to highlight where time is being wasted so that processes can be streamlined.

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