Local company takes on food service distribution worldwide

A new Charleston technology company has launched its software in the global market, with a product designed to standardize the food service distribution industry by improving efficiency and increasing margins.

“Our software forecasts a company’s need for each product, manages inventory and processes purchasing and outbound orders—it’s like having a supervisor on your shoulder telling you what you need all the time,” says Cecil Duffie, CEO of Integrated Supply Chain Solutions in Mount Pleasant. “We eliminate waste in motion. Your invoice is always 100 percent accurate and your outbound order going to the customer is always 100 percent accurate.”

ISC Solutions is a new subsidiary of parent company Integrated Supply Chain Group, which purchased Cambar Software Inc. in 2002. Cambar’s focus has always been on developing software for distributors, but its new arm intends to capture the food distribution market as well.

The company’s team of 45 software engineers and technology professionals spent a year and half making more than 150 changes to tailor the software to its target market. For instance, food distributors have a higher need to track freshness than a company that ships computer parts; ISC Solutions software enables a company to track every food item by lot number and expiration date. Also, food comes frozen, dried or pre-cooked and is measured by weight, not by unit. The software provides accurate inventory analysis, which reduces replenishment time and excess stock in the warehouse.

In the last month, ISC Solutions has successfully implemented its product for Theodor Wille Intertrade in its Germany-based distribution center. TWI manages worldwide food distribution services for U.S. military bases and operations in Western Europe and throughout the Middle East.

ISC Solutions is also implementing its software at the IJ Co. in Knoxville, Tenn., the eighth largest broad line food service distributor in the United States. IJ Co.’s facilities run the full gamut of the market, offering distribution to popular chain restaurants and institutions as well as independent restaurants.

The trend in the marketplace is to get away from custom software, because of the expense of maintaining the systems and the difficulty in adding new features. “These two accounts both had personal IT solutions, and the cost of updating and expanding those systems was enormous. We’re bringing to them a standard, out-of-the-box solution operating on the Microsoft Windows platform that meets their needs and can be tailored to a degree,” says Duffie.

“Their main goal was to improve inventory accuracy,” says Ron Tripp, director of professional services for ISC Solutions, who ran the installation team at TWI’s German facility. “TWI purchases food from the United States on container ships, which take around 45 days, so food can’t be spoiled when it gets there. And it needs enough shelf life when it arrives to be shipped and used at these military bases. TWI needed expiration tracking and improved accuracy. The other thing was to capture real time quantities—they never knew how much they had on hand or the value of their inventory at a given moment.”

“IJ and TWI switched to our product because they needed to expand and meet new challenges,” says Mark A. Roth, ISC Solutions senior vice president of sales and marketing. He explains that the company’s software can take advantage of new features, such as radio frequency identification (RFID), which has been mandated for food service suppliers by the Department of Defense. “Companies can also integrate new features such as paperless delivery or voice technology. The software also has a sales automation tool that allows sales reps to place real time orders via laptop rather than processing batches at the end of the day.”

The software can also recommend increasing inventory of certain products based on historical data. “At Christmastime, it might ask you if you shouldn’t be ordering a bunch of hams this time of year,” says Roth. ISC Solutions’ benchmarking also led them to include options for value-added processing, such as slicing and repackaging meats from bulk shipments, allowing customers to get more money for their products.

Depending on the size of the client, ISC Solutions offers a “host” service, where it manages the hardware and software needs for companies too small to have in-house IT or servers. “All they have to have is a PC, which is connected to a server here at the hosting facility. A larger operator would have their own IT department with a server on-site,” says Tripp. The cost of the software depends on the size of a distributor’s operation and number of warehouses, but ISC Solutions says that compared to a customized offering, the new software is 10 times less expensive.

ISC Solutions is marketing its technology at broad line food distribution trade shows and via direct mail and conventional sales. “Our target market is the 4,000 food distributors across the United States,” says Roth. “I’m talking to companies from Cisco all the way down to a small tortilla distributor. They service chains like TGI Fridays and even the mom and pop restaurants that can’t afford for their distributor to have products on back order. If you can’t provide them with their order, they’ll go elsewhere. We’re marketing to both large and small businesses.”