Think of food banks as wholesalers. They receive millions of pounds of food from various organizations, and they distribute the food to agencies that, in turn, deliver them to people in their area. An agency can be anything from a local food pantry, to a church soup kitchen, or a school breakfast program.
As you can imagine, the logistics of running a food bank are complex. Key to getting it right is an online store that takes into account all the ways an agency needs to order food, backed by what should be a very sturdy inventory and customer relationship management system.
Like many food banks, Capital Area decided to implement an Oracle platform called NetSuite, specifically SuiteCommerce Advanced, which is designed for this kind of application. They contracted a consulting company to create their implementation of NetSuite. Unfortunately, what Capital Area received wasn’t fit for purpose.
”The consultants didn’t ask the right questions; they didn’t listen carefully,” said Chris Raitzyk, the technical lead for Capital Area. “There was no collaborative back and forth.
“And they didn’t have the skills to create a usable e-commerce store.”
What they needed was a store that was as easy to use as Amazon, because their customers aren’t technically knowledgeable. A customer could be, for example, a pastor who is trying to order for her church’s food pantry in her spare time.
Many of the features the consultants had built into Capital Area’s implementation were customized, and prone to failure. Whenever Chris tried to fix one problem, the system broke in three other places.
Capital Area needed a rugged back-end system to manage their operations.
We needed to blow it up and rebuild.
Chris Raitzyk
ERP Administrator
What did we discover together?
The first thing CoLab did was a code review of the existing implementation. We discovered that the consultants had created many custom features that didn’t need to be customized; they could have used standard out-of-the-box NetSuite functions.
Eventually, CoLab and Chris decided it would be a waste of time to try to fix the original implementation. “We needed to blow it up and rebuild,” said Chris.
“We decided, first of all, to implement all the standard out-of-the-box stuff, so if there was a bug, we could easily find it and fix it. And then we decided to completely ditch the front end and build a new one.”
Next, Chris asked her regional team to pull together a group of customers she could interview about what they needed. “I didn’t want to make the same mistake, of just throwing something out there to them.” They gathered a lot of usable feedback that CoLab ended up implementing.
What we did
Working as one team, CoLab and Chris were able to rebuild the front and back ends in five months.
What was the result?
“Customers have been very happy, because it’s simple to use. They love the ability to edit orders, which they couldn’t before. They can order all their dry goods for delivery in two weeks, and then four days before delivery, see what perishables are available and add that in.
“People love the pictures and descriptions, because they don’t need to call us with questions.
“Our food resources team loves being able to give the customer more information, like pictures of nutrition labels. The more information we can give people, the more educated they can be about what they want.
“Marvin [Marvin Roman, the CoLab tech lead] created all that for us. He was 100% responsive on any little thing that came up. We’re on the East Coast and he was in California, and I think he got up at 4:00am on launch day to make sure everything was all right.”
