Produce companies interact with countless grower-shippers and their respective commodities on a daily basis.
With thousands and millions of cases flowing through your door each day, how can you tell which of those cases your organization should focus on and which you shouldn't let through the door at all?
Companies need to take time to understand the profitability of each specific grower-shipper and commodity to make a business case for handling those labels. You could be selling one grower-shippers’ grapes at a low margin, while another shippers' grapes consistently sell at a higher margin.
This could be due to quality, brand recognition, or simply your sales team’s relationship with the shipper. Regardless of the reason, identifying that trend can mitigate the risk of low margin sales. There's no need to keep sending those cases out at low margin when they take up the same space as the more profitable cases. Space is a premium in the produce industry and you should maximize the profitability of the square footage of your temperature-controlled facility.
Space is a premium in the produce industry and you should maximize the profitability of the square footage of your temperature-controlled facility.
Armed with the functionality embedded in native ColumbusFood for produce, you can instantly have that data at your fingertips. ColumbusFood ensures you have the necessary data at each transaction so you can capture critical data points for each lot transaction. Lot attributes like vendor/grower/shipper source, country of origin, lot specifications, farm, brand, block and others, can reveal data points to make those critical decisions about our inventory.
Once we have captured all that information in ColumbusFood, we can take that data into Microsoft Power BI to do profound analytics to determine the best use of warehouse space. Then, when you see trends in the grower-shipper and commodities, you can act on the information to understand the quality measures and incident registrations that were logged for those lots of inventory and act to remedy the low margin.
ColumbusFood enables better decisions like working with the shipper to improve quality, educating the sales staff to increase awareness of a label or simply to point out a gap in profitability to the team. Maybe the commodity itself is simply not a profitable one for your organization. Without this data we would be taping dollars to each case that we ship out.
We can help you analyze the feature integration to your best advantage so that you can confidently answer “yes” when the question of, "are we maximizing our space with the most profitable product?" comes up.
For more on ColumbusFood, visit our ColumbusFood for Produce page.
