KiBiz Saves Time and Money by Streamlining Operations of NY Bakery
Business Challenge
Originally they used a spreadsheet program, Excel, to keep track of everything, and it worked for a good while, until the business really started growing with the introduction and popularity of their artisan line. As the product line developed and expanded to so many items and variations of them, it became increasingly difficult to accomplish everything that needed to be done each day in Excel. “It was just too cumbersome and time consuming,” said Jarod Coppolo, NY Brooklyn Bread’s Controller and the person who did all the programming in Excel. He took the business as far as he could with Excel, automated his processes to the greatest extent the program would allow but it wasn’t enough.
Orders come in by phone and fax throughout the day, seven days a week, for items needed the following day. When an order came in while they were still using Excel, the employee entering the order would go to the product list created in the spreadsheet program and look for that specific item by name; then enter the order for each item on the order sheet. The process started with each customer’s order from the previous day. They’d save yesterday’s order as today’s order, clear it out and fill it in with whatever that customer ordered for today, searching through the form for each individual item by name.
As each order was entered into the system a process began that lead to a need for production lists, packing slips and invoices. To add a new customer to the old system became extremely complicated and time consuming. “We were busting out at the seams”, said Jarod. “Every day I needed to maintain that Excel file.” “If I had a new customer… I’d be programming for at least an hour.”
There were times when they’d run short of certain items, it wasn’t infrequent. Running the whole production process in Excel made finding the reason for those shortages quite a task. Jarod dedicated hours to researching his formulas and scripts to find out why they ran short of product in order to resolve those issues.
With the large number of variables associated with their product line and the growth they were experiencing, it became clear that NY Brooklyn Bread needed a database system to simplify and further automate their order taking and production process.
Brooklyn Bread
For a little more than 25 years, N.Y. Brooklyn Bread has been serving New York City’s five boroughs as one of the City’s largest wholesale Italian bakeries. For many years they operated as a large, commercial bakery, their product line fairly basic. They mass produced common items for large customers. Approximately three years ago they introduced a new line of artisan specialty items, producing an incredible array of hand-crafted goods and expanded their business into new markets, serving distributors, restaurants, institutions, retail bakeries and markets.
There are over 700 items in the product line that fall into roughly eighteen different categories such as baguettes, rolls, dinner rolls, focaccia, heroes, bagels, paninis and obviously more. Just about all of their products can be ordered in numerous varieties.
It’s impossible to estimate the number of people who purchase their products every day: their distributors deliver to hundreds of outlets throughout New York City.
www.nybrooklynbread.com
Successful Solution
To begin, all the descriptions that had been used as names for individual products were replaced with an Item Number. Every product is now identified and sorted by a four-digit code.
In the KiBiz System, everything is tied together and organized making the process much more efficient. All orders are entered into the KiBiz System, which generates a Production List for each of the bakery’s six departments. A Packing Slip is generated with the customer’s name on it so the right items get into the right packages for pick-up. An invoice is generated by the System for all items produced and packaged that day for each individual customer and at the end of the week a statement is generated for each one, compiling and totaling all of that week’s invoices. Previously Jarod spent hours creating weekly statements for billing.
Since a given customer’s order will vary significantly from day to day but be quite similar on the same day every week, KiBiz created and stores in the System a unique order for each customer for each day of the week. When an employee goes to the system to enter an order, it’s a simple process to access that template for that day, for that specific customer and make the minor changes, if any to complete it, replacing and streamlining the way they previously did it by saving and using the order form from the previous day, to create a new one.
Entering a new client into the KiBiz System is simple. Previously, all the formulas and scripts applicable to a client had to be created anew and applied to that client’s records. With KiBiz everything is automatically applied when a new client is entered into the System. Once set up, adjustments are easy to make.
We then extended the order entry system to the Web utilizing the FileMaker API for PHP, which made adding this capability so easy. Customers enter their orders over the Internet and submit them to KiBiz, replacing the need for each order, whether phoned or faxed in, to be manually entered by an employee.
Customer Benefits
Maybe the biggest difference the KiBiz System has brought to NY Brooklyn Bread has been the ease the System has provided for their growth. Where once Jarod would have seen acquiring a new customer that had a chain of a hundred stores as a programming nightmare, today with the KiBiz System it’s a very simple data entry process. KiBiz easily handles their extremely large product line and all the variations for flavor, and texture. The scalability of KiBiz enables NY Brooklyn Bread to continue to develop their unique line of specialty products, and take on all the new customers those products attract.
KiBiz saves them time in many ways but especially with Billing. Previously Jarod literally sat down with seven invoices for each customer weekly and ran tape on an adding machine to total them up and generate a weekly statement. With KiBiz the weekly statement for each customer is generated with the push of a button.
The shortages that had been a regular problem and so time consuming to resolve, ceased to be an issue. KiBiz calculates and integrates the data involved in production more accurately than their old system was ever able to.
Today, using KiBiz, NY Brooklyn Bread accomplishes more than ever, with a much higher degree of efficiency, yielding a more profitable operation for NY Brooklyn Bread.
“KiBiz saves us time in many ways but especially with billing. Previously I literally sat down with seven invoices for each customer weekly and ran tape on an adding machine to total them up and generate a weekly statement. With KiBiz the weekly statement for each customer is generated with the push of a button.”
Jarod Coppolo, NY Brooklyn Bread’s Controller