Reshaping Profitability Management at Dot Foods
SKU Rationalisation and Exploding Complexity

Dot Foods is the largest foodservice redistribution company in the US, with revenues of $8.2 bn across 112,000 products from 830 manufacturers. Dot Foods consolidates these products and delivers in less-than-truckload quantities to distributors nationwide. Naturally, this means immense data volumes, an explosion of operational complexity, and large indirect costs.

“CadDo’s responsive customer service and flexible software enable us to turn things around at speed. We can manage our profitability and reporting rapidly so that we can focus on getting value out of the results. We are looking forward to exploring more of the functionality and enhancing our analytics capabilities.”

Bill Brooks
Director of Finance

http://www.dotfoods.com/

Our Understanding

Dot Foods approached CadDo to look to replace their existing profitability management solution based on a legacy activity based costing (ABC) model. The legacy solution had two key problems:

  • It had failed to scale up as the business grew over time, causing excessive performance degradation. End-to-end processing for a single period was taking 24 hours. Significant time was being wasted not only on processing, but also operating the solution and users having to deal with extremely slow reports. All at the expense of focussing on results and making decisions.
  • It had failed to meet the flexibility and responsiveness needs of the business. This meant model change requests kept piling up and often quick and suboptimal options were chosen when making changes due to technical and time constraints.

Our review of the existing solution and gap-analysis confirmed that we could migrate the existing solution onto CadDo’s Microsoft Azure based scalable platform.

Our Approach

Utilising our automated migration tools, we migrated the entire solution onto our platform. Within 2 weeks the system was finalised and a quarter’s worth of data validated. 2 weeks later, and the remaining 10 year’s of data was migrated and validated, meaning the new solution was live in just 4 weeks.


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Measures of Success

Speed of delivery and highly responsive customer service were CadDo’s unique selling points for Dot Foods. This led to not only a full migration, but also an ongoing managed service approach. The CadDo consulting team now business partner the Finance team by: maintaining the solution; supporting new modelling and design; delivering reports and analytics to business teams.

The scalability of CadDo’s solution made performance issues a thing of the past with end-to-end processing times reducing by 87%. Finally the core team and users were able to focus on getting value out of the results.

Through working with our highly responsive consulting team, our know-how and expertise in business modelling, a raft of critical pending changes were very quickly implemented in succession. This allowed the changes in Dot Foods’ business to be reflected in their analytics, at speed, so that decisions can be made with the right results. We’ve paved the way for further improvements and a more accesible and value-added reporting access for users.