Sep 5, 2012, 9:18am

Seacore Seafood, Canada’s leading importer, distributor and custom processor of fresh and frozen fish, seafood and live lobsters, has achieved and sustained remarkable growth in the most efficient way possible, due in part to the installation of S2K ERP software from VAI (Vormittag Associates, Inc.). Recognized as one of Canada’s 50 Best Managed Companies, Seacore capitalized on its inward and outbound logistics to make its consumer brand, OceanPrime, widely available across North America while managing more than 5,000 fresh and frozen items in inventory.

From its state-of-the-art 75,000 square foot facility in the Toronto suburb of Vaughan, Ontario, Seacore houses its three distinct divisions – OceanPrime, Fisherman’s Depot and Seafood Depot – which serve thousands of consumer, retail and wholesale customers. Its extensive network of inward and outward logistics allows Seacore to buy seafood directly from the source – whether it’s trailer trucks picking up seafood in New England or Florida, flights arriving from the Philippines and Europe or shipments from Asia and South America. This allows Seacore to provide a wide variety of fresh, high-quality seafood ranging from crab legs from Alaska to barrmundi from Australia and salmon from Ireland.

To keep up with the growing demand for its products, Seacore automated many of its core business functions, including inventory management, accounting, route management, order entry, logistics and retail point-of-sale by installing VAI’s S2K software five years ago. Since then, Seacore has realized tremendous business benefits from this installation including:

• Improved Accounts Receivables Management
  • 85% of Seacore’s account receivables are current which is almost unheard of in the food industry.
• Faster Customer Delivery Rates and Reduced Order Picking Time
  • Seacore has hastened its truck routing process by 50%, ensuring extremely high levels of prompt customer delivery. Through the S2K Route Manager, Seacore was able to see all of its orders as well as the number of orders per route and then make the business decision on how to set up the deliveries most efficiently. And through the bulk and Wave picking, Seacore reduced its order picking time by 40%, which further increased its already impressive on-time delivery rates.
• Streamlined Fish Cutting Process
  • By automating fish cutting, Seacore took three or four steps out of the process and made it 80% more efficient than it was previously. This allowed Seacore to save time and service more customers, thereby growing its business exponentially.
• Up-to-the-Minute Consolidated Financials
  • Seacore can now view its consolidated financials at the push of one button – so they can see instantly how retail sales are faring hour-to-hour or minute-by-minute each day. This is especially important during busy seasonal periods like the Christmas holidays when the retail division realizes a 1000% sales increase.
• Greater Inventory Accuracy
  • With three distinct divisions sharing a master inventory, Seacore wanted to do automatic transfers within each company in real-time. VAI customized the S2K installation so that if one Seacore division used an item that was purchased by another company, an automatic transfer would be made and the inventory along with the ledger accounts would be auto-adjusted to keep everything in balance. The S2K installation also introduced BIN locations to the Seacore warehouse, allowing the Seacore staff to know the exact location of an item especially when there are multiple pallets.
• Faster Order Entry
  • Seacore was able to hasten order entry as well as meet specific customer requirements. For example, a customer may want only certain items sold to their locations and their own item numbers would have to appear on invoices. With S2K, Seacore can not only create order guides from their past history or from a custom list, but they can also restrict a customer to only buy those items.
• Automatic Real-Time Traceability
  • Seacore can now do full traceability on where their seafood is coming from and how it was caught – information which has become increasingly important to retailers such as Whole Foods as well as its consumers. With S2K, Seacore can now provide this information to customers in real-time.
• Integrated Point-of-Sale
  • VAI customized the S2K implementation so that Point-of-Sale was completely integrated in real-time. This allowed Seacore to instantly see the inventory moving to Seacore’s retail store division from their warehouse. Seacore was also able to add seafood industry-specific items to the POS implementation such as Catch Weights and a wide variety of unit measures that would normally have to be scanned.

“VAI’s S2K software allowed us to reach phenomenal economies of scale that could not have been attained by generic ERP software solutions,” said Sal Battaglia, director of operations, Seacore Seafood. “The S2K installation dramatically improved nearly every part of our business – from accounting and logistics to inventory and warehouse management. By automating many of these key functions, our team can focus on critical aspects of our business such as sales and customer service. And we feel confident that we can continue our impressive growth trajectory knowing that our business is running as smoothly and efficiently as possible.”

On Tuesday, September 25^th at 2:00pm ET, VAI will host a webinar, “S2K for Food: A Complete Solution for the Food Industry,” that will examine the unique challenges and requirements of the food industry. Attendees will learn how S2K Enterprise for Food helps distributors meet the challenges of today’s economic environment by automating and integrating business processes across the organization. To register for the webinar, please visit here.

About VAI (Vormittag Associates, Inc.)

VAI is a leading independent mid-market ERP software developer renowned for its customized solutions and ability to automate critical business functions for the distribution, manufacturing, specialty retail and service sectors. An IBM Premier Business Partner, VAI is the 2012 IBM Beacon Award Winner for Outstanding Solutions for Midsize Businesses. VAI continues to innovate with new solutions that leverage analytics, business intelligence, mobility and cloud technology to help customers make more informed business decisions in real-time and empower their mobile workforces. VAI is headquartered in Ronkonkoma, NY with branch offices in Florida, Illinois and California. For more information, visit www.vai.net, follow @VAISoftware on Twitter or “like us” on facebook.com/VAISoftware.