West Liberty Foods/Norbest: Western Sales

The Client

West Liberty Foods, a grower-owned turkey cooperative, is a private label and co-manufacturer of ready-to-eat sliced processed meat, poultry and protein products.   Logan was contracted by West Liberty Foods to manage a reimplementation project of MFG/PRO in 2005.

The Opportunity

West Liberty Foods announced a sales and marketing alliance with Norbest, a federated turkey marketing cooperative based in Utah.  Under the new agreement, Norbest products would still be processed by Norbest member producers in Utah and Nebraska, while the sales and marketing responsibilities would shift to Western Sales, a newly created division of West Liberty Foods.

Logan Consulting was brought in to do an assessment of the current state of Norbest, and to propose and implement a solution to replicate the Norbest system processes in MFG/PRO within a very aggressive timeline of six weeks.  Norbest was running Norlink, a home-grown system created by an in-house IT staff dedicated to tailoring the software to meet the needs of the Norbest employees.

The Solution

Although Norlink was Progress-based, there were many processes that were not inherent to MFG/PRO which made the solution more complicated.  The five listed below were considered business critical and had to be completed prior to the go-live date.

1. A catch-weight scenario in which the customer invoice needed to be priced per pound shipped, but the product was stocked in a unit of measure not based on weight.
2. Allowance assessed per line item and accrued in  customer accounts. These needed to have the ability to be multiple per line item with various calculation methods
3. Brokerage percentages needed to calculated and based on shipped product and billed bimonthly.
4. Inventory levels, including lot numbers, needed to be tracked along with the expense of shipping and storing the product at 3rd party warehouses.
5. Flat file needed to be transmitted between the two processors and MFG/PRO with inventory and shipment information.  Each processor had different requirements, but one solution was found to suit both processors’ needs.

Using a series of triggers and wrappers attached to standard MFG/PRO, Logan was able to resolve all of the above issues into an integrated system with behind the scenes data transactions transparent to the user.

The Results

• Even given the tight timeline, Logan was able to identify the most critical needs quickly and complete the project on time and within budget.
• West Liberty Foods and Western Sales both use MFG/PRO.  Employees who work for both companies did not need to learn a new system for the Western Sales side of the business, only the modifications. 
• With Logan’s ability to replicate the Norbest business processes in MFG/PRO, Western Sales was able to make a clean transition to the new system while minimizing the effects on their customers.