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Digital Transformation at Old MacDonald Farms: A Personal Story
Old Macdonald Farms, a leading sausage producer, has been in business for 30 years with significant sales and a broad customer base. Facing operational challenges due to growth and outdated systems, the company adopted Odoo to digitize processes and enhance productivity. This transition has allowed for real-time data access and improved customer service, marking a significant transformation in their operations.
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Digital Transformation at Old MacDonald Farms: A Personal Story
- 1. The “King ofSausage” Reigns Supreme on
- 2. Old MacDonald Farms– “King of Sausage” 30 Years in business 850 Active Customers JMD$344M Sales in 2019 Segments: • Supermarkets • Wholesalers • Hotels • Schools • Office Delivery at Christmas
- 3. About Us Director ofOld MacDonald and founder of FT3 Advisory and Consulting Services, an Odoo Ready Partner Implementing Odoo to transform back-office Operations Implement Omnichannel marketing strategies Deploy ecommerce solutions and expand reach from local to regional and international markets With my Dad retiring, I wanted to help, but I have a family in the U.S., so relocationisn't feasible. We needed to evolve from a single leader structure to one where the management team leads collaboratively
- 4. We were experiencingchallenges due to growth and time in business… • Operations were disconnected and still mostly paper-based. • We have lags in our information, leading to stockouts, as well as an inability to manage margins and detect shifts in customer spending. We're spending most of our time estimating and trying to keep up with our accounts and not enough on new sales.
- 5. • Operations weredisconnected and still mostly paper-based. • We have lags in our information, leading to stockouts, as well as an inability to manage margins and detect shifts in customer spending. We're spending most of our time estimating and trying to keep up with our accounts and not enough on new sales. So We Needed to Scale…
- 6. So after athorough search, we adopted Odoo… • Cost Effective • Comprehensive • Integrated • Intuitive
- 7. … And startedour Odoo Journey Sales Invoicing Accounting Inventory MRP Point of sale Website Social Media eCommerce CRM Accounting Purchasing MRP Documents Marketing and Customer Service Order to Cash Accounting & Purchasing Today
- 8. Our First FocusIs On Digitizing Our Order-to- Cash Processes • With our old version of Peachtree for invoicing, and paper processes • only one associate could access the system at a time. • Sales reps used to have to call the office to check a customer’s balance before committing to taking orders • Communicating and managing customer price lists was a pain • We planned to migrate off Peachtree one salesperson’s book of business at a time. • But after a week of using Odoo, our staff quit using Peachtree altogether, using Odoo exclusively… I’m happy to say I wasn’t ready for this success but we’ve managed to keep up
- 9. So Far WeAre Seeing Productivity And Velocity Improvements… • Sharing “the computer” Everyone online • From Anywhere • Manual, outdated data real time sales analytics • Call for price/ availability Realtime Access
- 10. Odoo enabled usto outsource much of our back-office bookkeeping… In turn our staff will start to focus on customer contact and satisfaction And begin to leverage Odoo MRP and Inventory Management to avoid stockouts Kingston, Jamaica Northern India Sandy Bay, Jamaica Allowing us to scale and transform
- 11. Next, We’re LookingForward To Some Of The New Features In V13 • SMS Messaging • Digital Marketing • Improved Website Management
- 12. Odoo Is aGame Changer for Our Business • Our “One Platform” • Real Time Data Vs End Of Quarter Reporting • Margin And Price List Management • Seamless Information Flow. • Zero Dedicated I.T. Staff.
- 13. Questions. Answers. Discussion. •Conversation Starters • We use Odoo Online and highly recommend it vs. self-hosting. • Support is great and very responsive. • Since we don’t own any infra, we don’t anticipate needing dedicated technical support staff • Pay attention to organizational change management – adding the modules is easy. • Buy what you need up front – Odoo works, and you’ll save money over time • We’re currently at 18 (maybe 22 users shortly). We only got the 25% initial discount on the first 4 users.
- 14. Thank you. FollowOur Journey… Web Facebook Web www.oldmacdonaldfarms.com www.ft3consulting.com www.linkedin.com/in/kirkdacosta/ info@oldmacdonaldfarms.com get-odoo@ft3consulting.com Kirk@oldmacdonaldfarms.com
Editor's Notes
- #2 Hi I am Kirk DaCosta from Old MacDonald Farms, presenting our Success Story with the Odoo platform We’ve been live on Odoo for about 9 months now, and we are happy with it so far. We believe that Odoo has given us a solid foundation on which to scale and transform our business, and we are seeing evidence of that already… in fact, almost immediately, within the first week
- #3 A family business, Old MacDonald Farms was established in 1986. We make and sell the finest quality frankfurters, hams, sausages, and luncheon meats, supplying Jamaican supermarket, retail, wholesale, and caterering trades. Our products delight both home cooks and professionals! We pioneered the national production of jerk sausage and smoked chicken, and regularly make-to order specialty products like pastrami, pepperoni, and sausages for special events. Old MacDonald now offers the JellyWata line of beverages including Fresh Coconut 'Wata,’ Sorrel Drink and Cane Juice Next up... we are taking our brand overseas, with our first product designed to bring a taste of Jamaica to our friends and family in North America. Follow us for more details soon!
- #4 Here on the right you see my dad, our founder and managing director “Old MacDonald”. On the right that’s me: so long as I can keep the gray hairs at bay, : Young MacDonald. Though if we were to go by the grays, maybe he is the Young one. I rejoined as Director of the company, focused on Digital Business Transformation. Right now our areas of focus are Improving customer experience and collaboration, expanding our marketing capabilities and improving our cash and margin management. Out of the family business, my dad and mom were able to send my brothers and I to college in the United States. I took that opportunity and launched a career envisioning and building innovative, enterprise-scale solutions for some of Americas largest companies. One of the reasons I’m passionate about Odoo is that it is because of Odoo that I could take on this role. Before this solution was available, I would have been forced to choose between my career and returning to the family business. Many family businesses face this challenge – successful enough to give the children the opportunity for career advancement, but not quite big enough to lure them back… But once I found Odoo, I found a way to not just keep my job and rejoin the family business, but start and grow my own consulting company. I founded FT3 Advisory and Consulting Services, an Odoo Ready Partner. I still consult with my enterprise clients 30 – 40 hours a week, and spend another 10 – 15 attending to Old MacDonald…. It’s hard to tell where my role as Director of Old MacDonald stops and as FT3 Consultant begins – they overlap. I’ve since added a team of Data Scientists, and have “of Counsel” consultants on board that specialize in strategic communications, big data strategy, accounting/ bookkeeping and Odoo technical support.
- #5 As the business has grown and time has passed, it’s gotten too big for one person to manage day-to-day With about 850 active customers, 50+ staff, and over 45 products, staying on top of accounts receivable, inventory, margins and cost has been a challenge for our office staff of 6 and our founder to keep track of with our mostly paper-and-phone and legacy Peachtree Accounting processes Without direct access to information, our sales reps have to request Customer Statements to ensure we are up to date on collections before taking new orders, and often had to call the office to check segment or special pricing on products. When the phones are busy and sales can’t contact the office, we were running the risk of promising goods that wouldn’t be in stock on the commitment date, or we might offer goods at an sub-optimal price – either selling at a loss or pricing ourselves out of the market for a customer We're spending most of our time estimating and trying to keep up with our accounts and not enough on new sales, a lot of time estimating changes in customer spending rather than responding to the trends And lastly, 30 years on, “Old MacDonald” is looking to retire, spending more time with at home and less time in the office.
- #6 So for years I felt – and discussed with my dad – the need to put a platform in place that both allowed our management team to better handle our increased complexity to date, as well as position us to scale the business even more to match the market As he looked toward succession planning, I pointed out that anyone with the means to invest in our operation, or the skill and experience to be hired on in his place wouldn’t be looking to work as hard as he had. What’s more, it would be hard to learn the business quickly. As our office staff take on more management responsibility, we needed a way to collect and share information from the different functions so that the emergent management team could execute in a coordinated manner We needed a CRM so we could better manage our portfolio of customers An Inventory Management system so we could plan for- and react to customer demand Finally, we needed to put information in the hands of our sales team to best position them to win new customers and keep our existing customers happy
- #7 For years however, ERP class solutions were way our of our price range And small business systems didn’t always provide the manufacturing support we needed Further, even though the traditional ERP players now offer solutions for small and midsize businesses, we found that they were still very expensive compared to Odoo What’s more, point solutions like Salesforce (also expensive), Sage 50, Quickbooks, Wix, Wordpress, and so forth were also point solutions which would require expensive integration… and all those costs add up But Odoo already has even more functionality than we need today, And Odoo delivers this at a very low Total Cost of Ownership Because all the modules run on one platform there is no need for expensive and time-consuming integration work Because it runs in the Cloud, we can deploy cheaper Chromebooks and tablets and phones rather than deploying expensive PC computers. Because the system is flexible and comprehensive, we don’t have to spend much money or time to customize it And because it’s intutitive to use, we spend less time and effort on training than we thought we would have to
- #8 We first started with migrating our static website to Odoo. This gave us some experience working with and administering Odoo without taking on a lot of operational risk. After developing enough confidence and experience with Odoo, we turned our attention to our most immediate challenge – our Order to Cash processes. Once we started using Odoo for Ordering and Invoicing, we then needed to ramp up on Accounts Receivable. Picking up the purchasing side of the accounting operations was a natural next step With this foundation in place, we’ve just rolled out Odoo to our sales staff… now their greatest interest is in getting real time inventory status and forecast. To that end, we’re spinning up and effort with the operations team to leverage Inventory and MRP. Once that’s in place, we’ll add the Point of Sale module because we do have a couple of sales reps that rather than taking orders for delivery, take on a load of goods and sell as they go. Once we bring on those point of sale orders, our entire Order to Cash operation will be digital and up to date in real time Going forward, we’ll be executing our marketing strategy in parallel with the order to cash and accounting implementations. As a separate initiative, we’ve developed an omnichannel marketing strategy to really raise awareness of our brand and to drive sales for the Christmas season. Just like we’ve seen with the other modules, we expect that the flow of traffic and information from our marketing efforts into our ordering and fulfilment will just flow naturally with no need for expensive or time consuming integration development
- #9 So Order to cash is at the heart of our roadmap. Order to Cash is the Customer Service that matters It is where promises are made, and where promises must be kept to keep our customers happy. And it’s also where the revenue comes from. In the past, sales reps would wait till the day before delivery into their zone to submit their orders, for fear of the order getting lost. Then, at load time, often we were out of promised products With Odoo in place, our reps now submit their orders as soon as they receive them – ultimately we’d like to plan and send quotes to customers for confirmation. As we ramp up on this, we get a better forecast of product demand and can start to match our production to the orders to avoid stockouts Given Odoo’s multi-user capability vs the single-user Peachtree system we had, staff can access the system from the loading dock vs having to assemble and print a “loading sheet” to take to the dock, then to run back upstairs to correct invoices before printing for dispatch. And the order fulfilment process can happen while someone else is working applying payments or generating a customer statement
- #10 Beyond Order to cash, we are seeing productivity benefits across the board with Odoo Because we’ve moved our price lists and nominal costing off spreadsheets and into Odoo, we now have real time analytics for sales and margin reporting, whereas before it took significant effort to collate the information on a quarterly basis. And as mentioned before, we’ve gone from the office staff having to share the “one Peachtree computer” and managing other work on separate spreadsheets on their devices, to everyone online, on the same system simultaneously. Further to that point, we improved the efficiency at the loading dock when our loading clerk simply took her chromebook downstairs to the dock and began updating and generating invoices on the spot, rather than annotating her load sheet then running back upstairs to update the invoices in Peachtree and print before the trucks leave.
- #11 More to the point of Everyone Online Everywhere, working in the same database, Odoo has allowed us to scale up our accounting operations. We’ve been able to add bookkeeping support out of India, and get our Accounting With the extra help offsite, we are refocusing our onsite staff to focus on managing our inventory and staying in closer touch with our customers We believe we’ve only scratched the surface – with the platform in place, we’ve quickly picked up gains where it has been intuitive to do so, but there are a lot of opportunities to make gains as we learn to exploit the capabilities we’ve gained almost overnight… for example, now that we have real time insights into our data vs quarterly, we need to develop the habit and ability to react to that data daily and weekly, as opposed to when only quarterly was possible… Almost immediately, Odoo has given us the capability to dramatically improve our operations, to the extent that we’re doing more is a deliberate decision to take the organizational change and development of new habits and processes slowly so that we can keep our team focused on the business rather than the transformation….
- #12 While there is a rich market out there for digital marketing tools, again they are expensive to own, and then the point solutions eventually have to be integrated with the backoffice system We’re eager to get going with the Odoo web and marketing features because we anticipate very tight integration with the rest of our Odoo implementation. For example, the ability to post an offer or a coupon on a social media platform and have up to date pricing and availability from the database. Or to allow our marketing team to look at operations data and then launch or automate marketing plans based on the orders or production in flight, all from the same platform. Finally, we’re excited about the SMS features – many of our customers are mindful of their data plans and quite a few don’t use email. Whatsapp and Text are the best ways to get to them. What’s more, we anticipate that the ability to send a text rather than having to get them on the phone will free up a lot of time for our staff.
- #13 It’s our “one platform” for digital transformation. We now have real time data with which to manage our business vs 2 month-old data at the end of the quarter. We now have the ability to manage price lists and margins in real time to ensure we’re both operating profitably while offering competitive prices to our customers. With the improved flow of information, we can better keep our promises to our customers, and increase our level of service without adding staff. All this with ZERO dedicated Information Technology staff.
- #15 FT3 Advisory and Consulting Services, an Odoo Ready Partner Implementing Odoo to transform back-office Operations Implement Omnichannel marketing strategies Deploy ecommerce solutions and expand reach from local to regional and international markets Lead change from single leader to management team structure Old MacDonald Farms (Jamaica) Ltd A family business, established in 1986, we are purveyors of the finest quality frankfurters, hams, sausages, and luncheon meats, supplying Jamaican supermarkets, retailers, wholesalers, and caterers. Our products delight both home cooks and professionals! We pioneered the national production of jerk sausage and smoked chicken, and regularly make-to order specialty products like pastrami, pepperoni, and jerk seasoned chicken and pork blend sausage for special events. Old MacDonald now offers the JellyWata line of beverages including Fresh Coconut 'Wata,’ Sorrel Drink and Cane Juice Next up... we are taking our brand overseas, with our first product designed to bring a taste of Jamaica to our friends and family in North America. Our Shake & Jerk seasoning mix will be authentic, with no sugar or MSG added! Jerk cooking is an old tradition in Jamaica and we’re proud to take the “real deal” in seasoning to the U.S. and Canada. Watch for more details soon!