Berner Foods Transcends Traditional CRM Practices
Berner Foods is a supplier of quality food products, including natural cheese, specialty performance cheese, processed cheese and soy beverages. With entrepreneurial beginnings as a Swiss cheese maker dating back 60 years, the company offers products to the supermarket, drug and mass merchandiser club channels, among others. Berner also offers a full range of packaging and process options in the industry. Its facilities are USDA and AIB approved as well as ISO 9001 certified, and the company aims to meet the demanding standards of virtually every major retailer in North America.Growing Pains
Berner's biggest motivating factor for seeking a new customer relationship management (CRM) solution was its need to cost-effectively ensure a high level of customer service. The company needed a more standardized way to track and manage customer interactions, interdepartmental communications, product labels as well as customer orders as part of the ISO auditing process, which happens continually because Berner is a private-label manufacturer.
Berner was looking to improve interdepartmental communications. For instance, some of Berner's salespeople are continually traveling; others work in an office daily as internal coordinators, supporting the external sales team and processing customer orders, requests and issues. Not only was the company experiencing a disconnect between the external and the internal sales teams, but internal sales representatives were physically separated from the rest of the company.
The communications challenge was exacerbated by Berner's rapid business growth. Jason Ulrich, IT business analyst at Berner Foods, explains, "We have a meeting every week that's designed to get everyone on the same page, but you can't rely on one or two hours a week. You need to enable effective communications at all times."
Another challenge for Berner was its inability to accurately track marketing campaign success, return on investment of product samples sent to existing and prospective customers, new product requests from customers and the success of new products. Reporting was burdensome because of the disparity between systems and databases, and the quality of the data was often questionable. Moreover, because of Berner's projected growth, the system had to be able to operate on a large scale. Berner realized that these challenges required more than a generic CRM system; they required a robust and comprehensive solution designed specifically for food and beverage manufacturers.
Finding a Fit
A long-time Ross Enterprise customer, Berner came across Ross CRM for Process Manufacturing in 2005 and immediately began evaluating the system and its potential fit with its unique requirements. Ross CRM for Process Manufacturing is designed for the complex needs of process manufacturers, helping them to integrate and manage business while increasing competitive advantage. After an extensive evaluation, Berner purchased and deployed Ross CRM in early 2006 and has since realized a number of significant benefits.
"Traditional CRM answers questions like how many customers do I have? Which ones are the most profitable? What products are they purchasing? When did I last speak to them?" says Ulrich. "But Ross CRM takes this to a different level. You can manage much more than customers and prospects."
By having a truly unified view of all customer-related activities and processes, Berner can now perform detailed analyses of how assets are being used from sales all the way down to production, enabling it to better analyze trends, identify potential issues and capitalize on opportunities.
"For example, we can now easily determine how many quality issues a specific customer has logged with us this year, how many samples a customer has requested and how many of those samples have turned into orders," explains Ulrich. "We can also see what the ROI on those samples is, as well as calculate our cost of sale. And we can take it to an even deeper level and see what our ROI is on specific marketing efforts."
The system has also helped Berner to more easily comply with ISO requirements. The system allows many of its departments to track issues affecting quality and customer satisfaction -- something previously managed with a series of spreadsheets. Ulrich also believes that the solution helped to improve internal communications within the sales team.
"Having all of this information centralized and available to so many different departments has been a boon for our business," he says. "It keeps all of us on the same page, and that helps us avoid time delays, costly errors and inconsistencies."
Full Integration
For Berner, the flexibility of the CRM system has been a key factor in its success. One area where the company has made a number of customizations is in the label management area. Berner routinely sends out samples to customers and prospective customers. This process involves managing and tracking more than 350 labels and an enormous amount of product information. The solution allows Berner to better track these samples -- along with their recipes, label data, product cost, where the samples where sent, and what, if any, orders were generated from the sample.
As for the future, Ulrich is excited about the upcoming expanded integration between its ERP and CRM systems. Ulrich says, "Being able to take data straight from our ERP system to generate more and better reports through Ross CRM will be extremely beneficial."