 J&B WholesaleAcorn Serves up Profits for Food Distribution Company
- Founded in 1979, J&B Wholesale is headquartered in St. Michael, Minnesota with sales offices in Fargo, North Dakota, Omaha, Neb. and Rice Lake, Wis. The company has about 375 employees and serves a nine-state area of the Midwest with meat products, freight and cold storage operations.
- "Our company was founded by a salesman and his son, and built on the premise that the more customers you get, the more dollars you could add to the bottom line," says Kurt Anderson, who is director of Operations/IT at J&B Wholesale. "Yet, in this day and age, you have to look at the cost of sales from an operational perspective, maximizing profits within volume."
- "Until we began using Acorn's profitability solutions, we couldn't put our finger on the cost of doing business," he explains. "What would it cost to add a new product line, some new trucks, a new customer? Should we get rid of certain products? Enforce minimum order sizes? Eliminate some processes? We never had a definite answer."
- J&B Wholesale had a vision for getting to the next level, and was well on the way with a 21 percent growth in revenues from 1999 to 2000. The company turned to Acorn in November 2000 to ensure that the growth would continue. Anderson says he was immediately impressed with Acorn's common sense approach and philosophy regarding profit optimization.
"Before we implemented Acorn's solution, we'd go after the business first and worry about profitability later."
Acorn's profit solutions allowed J&B to evaluate and analyze the profitability of every area of operations, from customers and suppliers, to products, market segments and even remote offices and staff
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- "Now when we are striking deals, we are coming from a position of confidence in our numbers. This makes a huge difference in our ability to know when to say when. I can comfortably say we had an ROI the minute we signed the purchase agreement."
- Kurt Anderson, J&B Wholesale.
- "Acorn did an excellent job of listening to us," said Anderson. "This is key to implementing any software package. Acorn has been phenomenal in interacting with us, making sure we understand along the way exactly what we were implementing. This solution provided us with very powerful data and Acorn worked with us to ensure that we understood the numbers and that we disseminated them correctly throughout the company."
- In many respects, J&B Wholesale has learned to do business a whole new way since implementing Acorn System's software solution.
- "Most importantly," Anderson points out. "Acorn has helped us slice and dice, analyze and then use the data to pinpoint areas of our business that need further evaluation and attention, offering ideas and suggestions on how to make these areas profitable."
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With the help of Acorns profitability systems, we discovered that a select segment of accounts were the source of most of our
profits, despite having lower gross margins. Acorn helped us shift our strategy and shift the way we served clients, resulting
in a doubling of profits in less
- than one year.
- Ben Samuels, President
Victory Packaging
Industry Business Solutions
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