Background
Established in 1944, Nutritional Foods is the largest manufacturer of powdered food products for South Africa’s catering market. Its wide range of merchandise, manufactured from two facilities based in Industria and Klerksdorp, includes soup and cold drink powders, stews, gravies and spices. Since 1997, the company, which has an extensive network of branches and agents throughout Southern Africa, has been actively involved in exporting a diverse variety of products to a number of export markets.
Challenge
Nutritional Products came on board as its clients in the mining industry were using Quadrem as their e-commerce platform. They were encouraged to implement a method that would ensure consistent business procedures to reduce their customers’ transactional and supply chain costs.
Solution
In order to meet the needs of its customers, Nutritional Foods opted to incorporate Quadrem’s hosted order management system known as SupplyCentreTM into its operations in 2003. This offered a practical, automated method that would swiftly fulfil sales requests with reliable, documented processes.
The move soon proved not only to be of benefit to its clientele, but to the company itself. It eliminated cumbersome manual processes that are expensive, slow and difficult to track, and improved margins by lowering the cost of doing business. Nutritional Foods selected Quadrem ahead of its competitors as because it found Quadrem’s fees reasonable when compared to other electronic trading market places, and there is always a constant flow of communication, advising Nutritional Foods of updates on the Quadrem system.
A major factor that holds back suppliers from venturing into the world of eprocurement is the idea that moving to a technological platform will cause them to lose the personal relationships they have spent years nurturing with key customers.
However, Nutritional Foods has found that this could not be further from the truth. The company believes that the formalisation of a buyer-supplier relationship within an e marketplace adds a set structure for the relationship. This has threaded a whole new element of mutual trust and interdependence through its interaction
with customers, really cementing the business relationship.
Results
Since joining Quadrem, Nutritional Foods has reaped numerous benefits:
- Administrative errors have dropped by 90%
- Administrative efficiency has increased by 10%
- There have been substantial time and monetary savings as a result of a sharp reduction in phoning and faxing
- With automated processes and delivery cycles that are much more efficient, there is less need for negative interaction such as following up on late deliveries,orders getting sent back, or chasing up on payment
- Although there are now fewer meetings and telephone conversations with clients,
- when they do talk, it is ‘always from a positive stance, on both sides’