How does a wholesale distributor continue to add value in the produce supply chain? This has been top of mind for Ben B. Schwartz & Sons, one of the original tenants of the Detroit Produce Terminal. Established more than a century ago, family-owned Ben B. has a younger generation of ownership coming up, focused on growth and innovation. "Owners Jake and Drew Billmeyer concentrate on growing the company outside of Detroit while using innovation to provide value for their customers during this process of growth," says Bill Loupée, Chief Operating Officer at Ben. B. Schwartz & Sons.
Over the course of the past five to six years, the company has strategically looked at expanding their distribution radius. "We don't want to be known just as a Detroit distributor because in the U.S., we currently distribute everywhere east of the Mississippi as well as into Ontario, Canada." To support the geographic expansion, several outside sales representatives were hired in remote offices like Chicago and Cincinnati with the objective of delivering product anywhere overnight within a 1,000-mile radius of Detroit. "After successfully expanding our distribution radius, we are now layering in new services that provide value to the customer," Loupée said.
Bill Loupée.
Staying relevant
Ben B. provides a broad line of fresh fruits and vegetables to four or five-store retailers, national retail chains as well as food service providers. In addition, the company has a repacking facility and a mesh bagging operation for citrus. "Now, we're evolving to stay relevant and keep the business sustainable. We don't grow anything, and we don't retail anything to the customer. By leveraging technology and innovation, we feel we can stay relevant. It's applying the tools that are out there in the logistics space to what we're doing here in produce," Loupée commented.
Custom ERP system: Ben B Access
"A large portion of what we do every day is logistics based and as a result, it makes sense to take the leading-edge technology that has proven itself to work in the logistics space and figure out how we can apply it in our world." With this in mind, the company decided to build its own ERP system. There are a few Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) providers who serve the majority of the produce industry, but it's not possible to buy software off the shelf that suits everybody. "For us, to differentiate, we realized the custom modification with current ERP providers was going to be very expensive and wouldn't get us where we wanted to be fast enough. As a result, we developed our own modules."
Screenshot of the Ben B. Access dashboard, providing comprehensive order information, including shipping status, expected delivery, distance completed, carrier information, direct driver phone numbers, insights into any late trucks via exception management and more.
Tailored transportation system
A transportation management system (TMS) was developed to help determine how to get product from A to B in the most efficient and most advanced way, but also alert customers in the event there is an issue with their shipment. TMS also provides carrier sourcing and has the ability to track and trace trucks while a driver app enables drivers to report their arrival times. In case customers don't have the ability to do a full-scale electronic data interchange (EDI) implementation, other options are offered such as uploading spreadsheets, making the system accessible to the broad range of Ben B.'s customers. "What makes our system stand apart are the customization options from a technology standpoint, giving us the ability to tailor the system to each individual customer."
Internal benefits
Internally, the system also helps employees to make better decisions. "Is a commodity market rising or falling, how much product should be purchased based on those trends and when is a good time to run a promo? Our employees are being fed this type of data, and this knowledge has helped them become experts in their fields. Ultimately, it's also helping our customers as they recognize us as their partners in business and rely on us in helping make decisions."
Building trust
Not only has the ERP system made processes at Ben B. more efficient, it has also created more trust between the company and its customers. "We've been able to make changes slowly, just like chipping away little by little and getting one percent better every day in ways that add value for the customer," said Loupée. Building the system took about two years and is still a work in progress every day. "We are continuing to build on it and while it is not always easy to measure the direct impact of the system, we're very excited about the significant sales growth we've experienced in recent years."
For more information:
Bill Loupée
Ben B. Schwartz & Sons
[email protected]
www.benbdetroit.com