In the fast-paced grocery business, staying on top of product prices, promotions, and merchandising plans requires managing mountains of ever-changing information. United Food Group, LLC, which does business as Moran’s All Natural, a huge processor of ground beef, needed a solution to help address its information distribution challenges. A third-generation family business, Moran’s distributes its fresh and frozen ground beef and hamburger patties to grocery retailers across the country. Moran’s employs a team of field reps who travel to retailers to inspect product displays and ensure retailer compliance with promotional events, as well as a cadre of brokers and dealers to distribute and maintain its products.
“We had two people working approximately 20 hours a week just delivering prices to more than 40 retail chains,” says Jeff Moran, director of national accounts for Moran’s. “Catalogs, images, promotional information, weekly prices, planograms, compliance information, and sales performance reports were being disseminated through e-mail, and the maintenance of distribution lists was a nightmare.”

Share Information Via A Web-Based Portal
Moran’s looked at dozens of options to automate its information distribution needs, but none had the simplicity and data-sharing capabilities it required. “Vendors who built portals, created community sharing solutions, and handled data pool synchronization all came to the table and left empty-handed,” says Moran. “So, we looked to m2vc, the vendor that had built our company extranet, and asked it to create a Web-based solution for us and our business partners.” m2vc crafted a solution, m2axis – The Merchandising Information Exchange, that enables suppliers, sales reps, and retailers to create, maintain, and share vital product information relating to pricing, promotion, and performance through an online interface.
“While all the data lives in a giant database hosted on m2vc’s servers, we have access to only our own information and the information that our business partners share with us,” explains Moran. “Think of it as a business version of MySpace. It’s easy to invite new business partners to join and even easier for them to sign up. We pay a small monthly charge for each of our users, while rep companies and retailers get to use it for free.” Whenever a new document is added or modified in the system, e-mail notifications go out to those who have elected to receive them.
To address its mobile inspection needs, Moran’s deployed m2vc’s m2mobile, which is installed on the field reps’ and brokers’ Windows-based mobile devices. “The inspection process is totally automated, so our nontechnical field reps didn’t need any special training,” notes Moran. “We are in the process of moving to smartphones, including the AT&T/Cingular 8525 and Sprint HTC Mogul devices with slide-out keyboards and high-resolution cameras. We also signed up for high-speed data services, such as EV-DO, to improve in-the-field inspection synchronization speed. The hosted portion of the m2mobile service that allows us to create forms or questionnaires on the fly and view and export the inspection reports is also accessible through m2axis.” Through m2mobile, suppliers and retailers can monitor compliance with product and promotion requirements by providing easy-to-build inspection forms or marketing questionnaires, deploying them to employees’ or agents’ PDAs in the field, and instantly sharing results through m2axis. “We can broadcast current promotions and instructions to verify that we have received our shelf space, as well as post interactive questions that allow multimedia responses,” notes Moran. “Our users adapted instantly to the new technology. Training was done in a group environment and took less than an hour for most individuals.”

Real-Time Communications Eliminate Errors
Since implementing m2axis and m2mobile, Moran’s has experienced a variety of benefits. “First, maintaining all our trading partners’ contact information was a tedious process, especially since there is a lot of shuffling of positions and locations of our retail contacts. Now, our trading partners maintain their own information, and we just access it when we need it – anytime, anywhere. This feature is invaluable in enabling us to contact our retailers instantly, especially in the case of a food safety recall.” 
Second, daily requests for product information from brokers and sales reps have stopped entirely, as the field personnel can access and distribute every possible type of product information requested by their accounts. Third, Moran’s has reduced the time needed to maintain and deliver weekly prices by 80%. With a single click, pricing is delivered to all the key people in Moran’s business network – in a format that they choose – on the Web, by fax, or in an e-mailed spreadsheet.
The event calendar function of the system has helped Moran’s achieve a zero-error rate on retailer promotions. “Retailers are continually adjusting the promotions until the very last moment before ads go to press, causing last-minute communications between the sales teams and production,” Moran explains. “We constantly had errors in communicating which product finally made it to print and at what price it needed to be prepriced for retail. Now, with this centralized information center, instead of e-mails and faxes that didn’t always find all the contacts that needed to be in the loop, everyone is in the loop at the moment of decision. Trading partner collaboration on promotions and events with m2axis has completely eliminated person-to-person e-mails, and everyone is accessing the identical, current information.”
Moran’s can make available online all the files its trading partners need, ranging from account setup, EDI (electronic data interchange) documentation, budgets, sales performance reports, and so on, and any of them can be specifically tailored for each trading partner. “This is especially great in those situations when you need to get a ‘too-large-to-email’ presentation to your sales team, as they can access any size file from anywhere in the world,” notes Moran. “This has been a lifesaver for us.”
Finally, m2mobile has saved Moran’s 25 to 30 hours a week in time spent compiling paper-based information into usable data. “At one time, we considered this a ‘nice-to-have’ feature, but it’s become something we could not be a competitive supplier without, in both our own and our customers’ eyes,” concludes Moran.

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