Microsoft Dynamics
Customer Solution Case Study
Major Produce Distributor Drives Agility with Flexible ERP
Solution
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Wholesale and distribution—Consumer goods
distribution
Customer Profile
Based in Chicago, the Anthony Marano Company has 300 employees
and is the largest produce distributor in the Midwest.
Business Situation
The Anthony Marano Company wanted to improve purchase order
processing, including landed-costs settlements, and automate bank
reconciliation.
Solution
The company deployed Microsoft Dynamics AX for its robust
development environment that would ease customization.
Benefits
Streamline deployment
Improve business insight and vendor relations
Reduce manual effort, improve productivity
Ease IT administration
Support growth
“In terms of the IT agility it provides us, Microsoft Dynamics
AX is simply unmatched by the other ERP packages out there.”
Chris Nowak, Chief Technology Officer, Anthony Marano
Company
The Anthony Marano Company is a major produce distributor based
in Chicago, Illinois. The company prides itself on its ability to
provide same-day delivery and works hard to maintain a streamlined
operation both through technology and process improvements. Most
recently, the company deployed Microsoft Dynamics AX for its robust
development environment, enabling the Anthony Marano Company to
support an agile business. By using the new solution, the company
has implemented continuous business improvements, most notably the
capability to calculate landed costs and automate bank
reconciliation, both of which have led to significant improvements
in productivity and business insight. With Microsoft Dynamics AX in
place, the Anthony Marano Company has continued on a path of
manageable growth, bringing new enhancements to its business
without increasing overhead costs.
Situation
From the heart of Chicago, Illinois, the Anthony Marano Company
distributes produce to retailers in the surrounding Chicago
metropolitan area and parts of Wisconsin and Indiana. The company
has approximately 300 employees and is the largest full-line
produce distributor in the Midwest, with more than 400,000 square
feet of fresh produce in its facility. In the highly competitive
produce distribution market, the Anthony Marano Company
differentiates itself from its competitors by its ability to
deliver produce on the same day a customer orders it.
Providing same-day delivery has required the Anthony Marano
Company to maintain a highly responsive and efficient operation.
Currently, the company handles a couple thousand invoices a day and
receives, at a conservative estimate, around 600 truckloads of
produce a month. To grow to this point, the company has taken
advantage of the latest technology to help ensure that it can
maintain its high-quality services while keeping administrative
overhead under control. Working with the company since 1996, Chris
Nowak, Chief Technology Officer of the Anthony Marano Company,
recalls the company’s evolving IT environment. “When I first
started, we relied on a highly customized accounting solution that
had become impossible for us to customize and support, so we made
the decision to go with a packaged solution in 1998 and used that
until 2009,” he says.
During this time, Nowak and his IT team made Microsoft products
and technologies a major part of the IT strategy and followed a
virtuous cycle development strategy wherein they rolled out small
IT improvement projects and areas of functionality into production,
tested those changes with employees, and implemented ongoing
improvements both at a technology and process level. To help in the
implementation of major technology deployments and initiatives
while keeping its IT team lean, the company relies on experts from
Microsoft Services for strategy, planning, design, deployment, and
implementation support and a few, select Microsoft partners.
Driving its most recent string of IT projects, the company
identified two major areas for improvement in 2009, which
included:
Streamlining purchase order processing and landed-cost
settlements. Because the price of produce fluctuates with the
market, the Anthony Marano Company must be able to adjust the cost
of goods sold on a purchase order after the company makes a sale.
In the past, adjusting the cost required multiple screens and
happened in batches. And because the process was manual and
labor-intensive, it was prone to error, requiring staff to run a
report afterwards to double-check their work.
Automating bank reconciliation. To keep administrative overhead
down following ongoing growth, the Anthony Marano Company needed to
be able to automatically import an electronic bank statement file
into its business management system to automatically clear and
reconcile outstanding checks. With its prior system, a task like
this required clerical staff to perform data entry.
Solution
At the same time that the Anthony Marano Company looked to bring
further capabilities to its employees, Microsoft released Microsoft
Dynamics AX 2009. Although the solution included a full range of
enterprise resource planning (ERP) capabilities, it also boasted a
robust development environment. “With Microsoft Dynamics AX, we get
an object-oriented solution, are able to code in X++ by using
Microsoft Visual Studio, and can use Visual Studio Team Foundation
Server to provide a stable, multideveloper environment to support
our virtuous cycle development strategy,” says Nowak. “In terms of
the IT agility it provides us, Microsoft Dynamics AX is simply
unmatched by the other ERP packages out there.”
Implementation and System Overview
Although landed-cost settlement and bank reconciliation
capabilities were top-of-mind, the Anthony Marano Company
understood that it would first need to get up and running. To
deploy the solution, Nowak and his IT team of only three worked
closely with Microsoft Services experts to perform architecture,
design, development, data migration, and performance reviews and to
reduce the risk of deployment by taking advantage of implementation
best practices. “When you undergo a project like this, you want to
know you are getting the right software through the right vendor,”
says Nowak. “By choosing Microsoft Dynamics AX and working with
Microsoft Services, I had complete confidence that the project
would be a success.”
The teams deployed the General Ledger, Bank, Accounts
Receivable, Sales Orders, Accounts Payable, Purchasing, and
Inventory modules. As part of this effort, the teams also migrated
a year’s worth of purchase order transactional data and master data
to Microsoft Dynamics AX. Incorporating the solution into the
company’s overall business management platform, the teams also
integrated the Accounts Payable, Purchasing, Accounts Receivable,
and Sales Orders modules with a legacy warehouse management system
and legacy transportation system. Currently, 20 people in
accounting use Microsoft Dynamics AX. To meet the Anthony Marano
Company’s most recent requirements, the teams also worked to
deliver the following customizations:
Figure 1. The Anthony Marano Company uses the lot settlement
screen to account for landed costs.
Lot settlement screen. Through a modified purchase order screen,
as seen in Figure 1, employees can now account for landed costs,
including material costs as well as landed third-party
miscellaneous charges, for produce as soon as it arrives. Employees
can then update costs as they change, even after the inventory has
been sold. “Every time we make a change to the price of a product,
it’s changing our general ledger, updating our profit and loss, and
changing our month-end revenue numbers,” says Nowak.
Bank reconciliation automation. Microsoft Dynamics AX
automatically imports bank statement files and automatically clears
and reconciles outstanding checks.
With core ERP functionality and customizations in place, the
Anthony Marano Company is now implementing additional areas of
functionality, including the add-on solution Positive Pay. In
future work, the company aims to take full advantage of electronic
data interchange to enhance its ability to negotiate prices and
quantities with vendors and retailers alike.
Benefits
As the Anthony Marano Company continues to grow, the company has
the flexible platform that it needs to drive ongoing improvements
and changes now and in the future. Says Nowak, “In addition to the
agility it has provided our business, the best part of Microsoft
Dynamics AX is that it’s an enterprise-ready product from
Microsoft. We know that the product and the support for it will be
available now and in the future.”
Streamline Deployment
To ease the implementation of Anthony Marano Company’s financial
management solution, an experienced team from Microsoft Services
dedicated itself to helping ensure the success of the project. In
addition to sharing deployment methodologies, the team from
Microsoft acted as an extension of Anthony Marano Company’s
organization, providing high-quality implementation, application
customization, and project management services. Because of this,
the Anthony Marano Company benefited from proven best practices,
increased capacity, lower risk, and the flexibility to respond to
the changing needs of its industry. Says Nowak, “Microsoft Services
brought a deep knowledge to the implementation that enabled us to
ease the implementation and meet our needs for very-specific
customizations, all while lowering the risk of such an
initiative.”
Improve Business Insight and Vendor Relations
With landed costs updated regularly, the Anthony Marano Company
now has insight into how the business is doing at any given moment,
leading to faster decision making and improved vendor relations.
Says Nowak, “As soon as we pay for a lot, we have a complete profit
and loss for that purchase. It’s the decision point that our
department heads use as they are selling the next load of produce.
And now we’re capturing more information than ever before, and it’s
all broken down by vendor and check number, providing us with a
more encompassing picture of the business.”
Adds Nowak, “Now, we can provide our vendors with a more
thorough and up-to-date lot sheet report that shows them how well
we did in selling their products. And we can now settle our
finances with them a couple days faster, greatly improving our
relationship with them.”
Reduce Manual Effort, Improve Productivity
By eliminating much of the need for manual data entry, the bank
reconciliation and lot settlement customizations have both led to
major improvements in productivity. Says Nowak, “Thanks to the
efficiencies we gained by implementing Microsoft Dynamics AX and
the customizations we made, we have avoided adding office personnel
as our business grows. In fact, we have been able to move staff
from data entry to sales support.”
Ease IT Administration
With Microsoft Dynamics AX in place, the company continues to
maintain a lean IT team of only three employees. “Being able to
bring in Microsoft Services and partners when we have a specific
need has enabled us to keep our IT team small and simply maintain
the solution by using Visual Studio and Visual Studio Team
Foundation Server,” says Nowak. “With all these tools available to
our team and a solid partnership strategy in place, our
responsiveness to new requests from the business is usually very
quick.”
Support Growth
With an agile IT environment, the Anthony Marano Company
continues to bring new functionality to production. “As we have
grown over the years, Microsoft technologies have been there to
support us,” says Nowak. “The addition of Microsoft Dynamics AX to
our business lets us approach the future with even more confidence,
knowing that we have the IT infrastructure in place to support us.
For example, as food safety guidelines become increasingly
stringent, we know that Microsoft Dynamics AX has the robustness
and flexibility to help us meet changing compliance and reporting
guidelines.”
Additional Resources
Read more about Microsoft Dynamics for the food and beverage
distribution industry.
Download a fact sheet on Microsoft Dynamics AX.
See Microsoft Dynamics AX in action.
Microsoft Dynamics
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information using the World Wide Web, go to:
www.microsoft.com
For more information about Anthony Marano Company products and
services, call (773) 321-7500 or visit the website at:
www.anthonymarano.com
For more information about Microsoft Services products and
services, visit the website at:
www.microsoft.com/services
Microsoft Dynamics is a line of integrated, adaptable business
management solutions that enables you and your people to make
business decisions with greater confidence. Microsoft Dynamics
works like familiar Microsoft software such as Microsoft Office,
which means less of a learning curve for your people, so they can
get up and running quickly and focus on what’s most important. And
because it is from Microsoft, it easily works with the
systems that your company already has implemented. By
automating and streamlining financial, customer relationship, and
supply chain processes, Microsoft Dynamics brings together people,
processes, and technologies, increasing the productivity and
effectiveness of your business, and helping you drive business
success.
For more information about Microsoft Dynamics, go to:
www.microsoft.com/dynamics