Key Food to Deploy Supplier Management Solution

Key Food Stores Cooperative, Inc., a major New York-based supermarket cooperative, plans to deploy a new supplier-management tool to help identify and recover lost supplier credits and efficiently update vendor files for integration into a centralized ERP system.

The cooperative is working with San jose, Calif.-based Lavante on the project, and will use its web-based Recovery+ solution. “In today’s competitive retail market, every dollar improves the bottom line, so it’s important to capture every credit that is rightfully ours,” said Tom Ricapito, controller, Key Food. “Lavante’s automated solution will enable us to quickly see the search results for missing credits and gain the benefit of those results much sooner than we would have using traditional manual methods or one-time auditing projects. We’ll now have the information we need right at our fingertips and capture those credits in a much more efficient and timely manner.”

Key Food realized that between periodic audits it was missing potential credits from suppliers that occurred for a variety of reasons, such as duplicate payments, improperly returned products or discounts not received. The supermarket chain wanted to automate this process in order to gain visibility into its auditing methods and more quickly identify and recover missing credits on a continuous basis.

Additionally, Key Food needed to maintain an up-to-date profile of its more than 6,000 active vendors and develop a centralized system to consolidate information from disparate ERP and accounting systems. Since Lavante Recovery+ includes vendor file cleansing and enrichment, it will ensure that Key Food’s vendor records are always current while avoiding duplicate profiles.

The Lavante solution is unique in offering a subscription-based solution at a fixed fee, unlike traditional pricing models that are contingency-based. “This pricing model is appealing to our senior management team since it takes the guesswork out of predicting costs and enables us to recoup lost revenue immediately,” added Key Food’s Ricapito.

Lavante Recovery+ -- which is delivered as an on-demand SaaS solution -- enables rapid deployment with low impact on customer resources, speeding results, according to the vendor. The advanced reporting capabilities of Recovery+ will give Key Food a paper trail of tracked supplier credits, enabling the chain to identify trends over time and reduce supplier risk.

Staten Island, N.Y.-based Key Food Stores Co-operative, Inc. includes more than 130 supermarkets spanning all five boroughs, Long Island, upstate New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. All Key Food stores are individually owned and operated, which allows them to meet the diverse needs of each neighborhood they service.