CUSTOMER: Shaw's Southern Belle Frozen Foods, Inc.
www.shawsouthernbelle.com

CORPORATE PROFILE
Headquarters:Jacksonville, Florida
Type of Business:Seafood processor
Number of Locations:One
Number of Employees:130+

SYSTEM PROFILE:
Operating System:Microsoft Windows NT
Users on System: 32
Sage PFW ERP Modules in Operation
. Formulas
. Inventory
. Order Entry
. Production
. Purchasing
. Accounts Payable
. Accounts Receivable
. Bank Book
. Crystal Reports
. FRx
. General Ledger
. PFWeb Decision Support

Mama Shaw knows seafood. With her husband John, she founded Florida's first crabmeat processing plant in 1934. Still chipper today at 90, she remains at the helm of Shaw's Southern Belle Frozen Foods, the nation's only company specializing in premium quality, customized crab, lobster and snapper stuffings.

Shaw's seafood mixtures are sold primarily to restaurants and institutions. American servicemen dine on them overseas. Some products are now available through major retailers like Sam's Club and BJ's. Not only are Shaw's mixtures perfect for crab cakes and gourmet fillings, but they also provide additional value for cooks looking to
stretch portions of increasingly costly seafood dishes.

THE CHALLENGE
Shaw's existing accounting package had definitely been a false lure. The stand-alone product was incompatible with any of the company's manufacturing systems, could not calculate income and losses on individual products, was not Y2K compliant, and would not even export data to a spreadsheet.

Joanne Zimmerman, Shaw's controller, went to seminars and product demos to learn about more advanced alternatives.

"We used to do emergency shipments all the time, air-freighting in onions from California or spices from New York. Now we practically never have to do this."
Joanne Zimmerman
Controller
Shaw's Southern Belle Frozen Foods, Inc.

"We needed something that would give us better insight into opportunities for enhanced profitability and efficiencies,"
she says. "We wanted a new system to manage everything in both operations and administration - allowing us to stay on top of inventory requirements, calculate the profitability of our recipes, and streamline production. Plus it had to be user-friendly enough that we could run it ourselves without hiring an MIS person."

THE SOLUTION
After a false start, Zimmerman selected the Sage PFW ERP suite of products, a fully integrated manufacturing and financial solution. She calls it "one of the best decisions I ever made."

Sage PFW ERP provides detailed information on Shaw's daily production
- what they're making, what materials they've used, and what it's costing. It helps Zimmerman identify which product lines are most profitable for future promotional efforts, and others that may need to be cut back or studied. She has been able to use the system to make decisions about reformulating specific products, or recommend making
them on a different machine.

"The new system has helped us cut losses in our mixes," says Zimmerman.
"Nothing comes out of a machine until the tube is full. At the end of a
production day, significant amounts of mix might still be in the machine. Now we can identify those amounts and recapture costs - which had been literally going down the tubes!"

Big improvements are apparent in the purchasing department, too. Accurate inventory data allows staffers to know exactly when ingredients reach a critical level, for reordering and better scheduling. "We're saving lots of money because we no longer stop production runs or switch jobs due to missing ingredients," Zimmerman explains. "We used to do emergency shipments all the time, air-freighting in onions from
California or spices from New York. Now we practically never have to do this."

Zimmerman is responsible for costing to develop selling prices. She uses Sage PFW ERP's Formulas module to do the work - calculating quantities of ingredients, ensuring that percentages 、of total batch weights add up correctly, and determining pricing. Costing that once took 45 minutes per product now requires only 10 minutes. Considering that Zimmerman may have 25 costing jobs on her desk at any one time, the time savings is significant.

"A wonderful feature in Batch- MasterPFW is the ability to set up
dummy companies without affecting system-wide information," Zimmerman
says. "When the ladies in the research kitchen send me a recipe, I create a temporary account. If the price doesn't come out favorably, I ask them to tweak things until we've got it right. Only then
do we transfer data to the real system. It's faster, easier and more accurate than the handwritten processes we had before."

Additional benefits come from increased on-time shipments to
customers. "Delayed shipments mean delayed revenue," Zimmerman says.
"They also hurt customer relations. In a competitive society like ours, service is key. Sage PFW ERP has helped us be more timely and effective with both existing and potential customers - and lets us position ourselves for increased future growth."