A Fresh
Start
Continued
MSS Technologies worked with Hortin and his team to keep the software code unadorned while still building a system that met Cafe Rio’s needs. “We kept the code as vanilla as possible,” says Art Cowen, the project manager from MSS Technologies. “Software setup can be done in a lot of different ways without code modification.”
Instead, the company modified a few business processes to fit the software, which Hortin says was a better business decision in the long run. “For one thing, a lot of changes were ones we wanted to make,” he says. “Most of our questions, when we were evaluating systems, were asked to determine if they would fit the way we wanted our business processes to flow.”
Hortin was able to get a running start by using Oracle Accelerator in conjunction with Composer, an enhancement to Oracle Accelerator built by MSS Technologies. Oracle Accelerator is designed to help midsize companies shorten implementation schedules and cut costs by aggregating implementation tools such as wizards and preconfigured software into one package. Roger Harris, vice president and general manager at MSS Technologies, says that Composer takes the concept a step further by letting Hortin answer a set of questions that MSS Technologies can use to customize the Oracle Accelerator settings. “When customers log in to the JD Edwards software, they see an accelerator specific to them,” says Harris.
The result: a significantly shortened implementation schedule. “We think it saved months of implementation time,” says Cowen, who says that Hortin’s leadership was a huge factor in the project’s success.
Seeing the Numbers Clearly
The company is already seeing results in its ability to access and manipulate financial data from a variety of angles. “It can see profitability by store now, for example,” says Cowen. “The JD Edwards system is going to help it make better, smarter decisions.”
Hortin has not yet had time for the training necessary to build his own custom reports, but he plans to be trained soon. In the meantime, he says, the products’ canned reports are very useful. “There are some really good reports we can pull out of JD Edwards,” he says. “The canned reports are much better than the ones we used from our old system.”
The JD Edwards system will easily scale as the company grows, and it is flexible enough to interface with a new inventory management system. One of Hortin’s biggest problems with the old system was that each restaurant receives a lot of deliveries of fresh ingredients—the invoices can run up to 10 or 15 items, all of which were manually entered into the GL system at the corporate headquarters. Hortin now has the restaurant managers create and upload a spreadsheet of the inventory items into the JD Edwards system, but this is just the first step. The company is beta-testing a restaurant inventory management and job costing system that will connect to the JD Edwards system to create a virtual supply chain. In the new scenario, restaurant managers will receive electronic invoices from US Foods, Cafe Rio’s major supplier. After reviewing each invoice, they’ll send it to the inventory management system, which will then funnel the data to the JD Edwards system. This also applies to inventory tracking, enabling the company to monitor inventory in real time and compare inventory data with point-of-sale data to ferret out potential waste.
“The supply chain will be mostly electronic, and the JD Edwards system has the flexibility to facilitate this change,” says Hortin. And the best part? Oracle’s JD Edwards EnterpriseOne also provides a long-term growth path, because Hortin knows he can take advantage of the system’s inventory management capabilities if corporate growth warrants the investment. “Once we have 100 stores, it may make more sense to look at the JD Edwards product line to see what the system can do for us,” he says. “The JD Edwards product line gives us the flexibility to make the best business decisions as the company grows.”
For More Information
Oracle for Midsize Companies
Assess Your Midsize Organization
The Value of Sticking with Vanilla
Carol Hildebrand is a freelance writer based in Massachusetts specializing in technology, business, and food.
