MultiValue From the Ground Up
Background
Concord Premium Meats relies on UniVerse to manage every aspect of its business, from manufacturing to distribution to sales. Toronto-based Concord Premium Meats was founded in 1993 with the goal of ensuring that busy families could enjoy premium-quality, pre-marinated and seasoned meat with only a few minutes of preparation. Today the company employs nearly 500 people in the United States and Canada.
Situation
Concord Premium Meats was founded by Irv Teper, a Toronto-based Chartered Accountant who had built a successful homebuilding business in the 1990s.
"Back then we needed a technology platform to help us manage all aspects of building houses, and that's when I met Seth Blumenstein of Asynchron Systems." Teper says.
"He really helped us build our company, and we developed a great relationship. In the early 1990s I was looking at getting into the food industry, and even before we opened our doors I contacted Seth to let him know what we were doing. He worked with us before Concord was a company, and when we opened in 1993 we already had the Asynchron custom-built UniVerse systems in place."
Implementation
"We've worked with Concord since their inception and tailored their solutions from the ground up to help them grow to become a very large company," says Asynchron founder Seth Blumenstein. "We have literally been with them since before day one, and have built and added new modules as the company's needs have changed over the last 25 years. The Rocket U2 products have been at the centre of making it all work because of how easy it is to build and integrate new custom modules and add new fields to existing data files, which is the core advantage of the UniVerse dynamic-data model." According to Teper, "We use the Asynchron UniVerse system for absolutely everything - it's my SAP. It's literally in every part of our business from job costing to inventory control to payroll to general ledger.
We started off using Asynchron for a few functions, and as the business has grown we've expanded what we use it for. For instance, we stumbled along with Excel spreadsheets for our costing reports, but eventually it got to a point where we couldn't do it anymore, so we converted to Asynchron. There isn't a part of our business that their solution doesn't touch."
Benefits
"There is one simple reason why we've been using Asynchron - it works," says Teper. "It's not a sexy application, but it's rugged. It never breaks, so we never worry about system outages or downtime. It just does what it's supposed to. When you get something that works this well, there is absolutely no reason to change. It never crashes, it never spits out incorrect data, and it has a sturdy architecture that has worked perfectly for over 25 years.
"The best part is that Seth and his team are very practical computer guys, so we don't have to waste time trying to explain what we want. They understand our business from the ground up, so we get turnaround that is not only fast but is completely on target. If we have a problem, we can literally take the Asynchron team to our warehouse and let them see what we are trying to do - and they go back to the office and build what we need."
Key benefits:
Rugged architecture
No outages or downtime
Handles multiple functions on one system
Can be easily expanded to manage additional projects