L&L Foods needed NetSuite for wholesale distribution to do three things particularly well: manage more than 5,000 SKUs, handle the unusual pricing requirements of food distribution, and connect its field sales process directly to its ERP.
What the company had was a NetSuite implementation approaching go-live—with no clear path to actually getting there.
Anchor Group provided the NetSuite optimization, customization, integration, and project management support needed to get the project across the finish line. L & L Foods went live with a connected mobile ordering process that reduced order processing and data entry time by approximately 40–50%, improved order accuracy, and gave sales representatives more time to grow customer relationships.
L&L Foods is a locally owned, family-operated wholesale food distributor with roots dating back to 1948. The company carries more than 5,000 SKUs across dairy, frozen food, dry grocery, snacks, foodservice products, non-alcoholic beverages, and supplies—including roughly 400 private-label Bucky Badger products.
This combination of perishable products, high SKU volume, scheduled promotions, and regional distribution made this an especially complex NetSuite food and beverage project.
Before NetSuite, L&L Foods’ sales representatives traveled to each store and location they served carrying binders filled with lists of the products that each customer typically purchased. Representatives manually recorded orders on paper, drove back to the company’s Verona headquarters, handed over the binders, and entered the same information into the company’s aging software.
Not only did this process create extra travel and duplicate data entry, it also provided for plenty of opportunities for a handwritten order to become an incorrect invoice. Now, under normal circumstances, an incorrect invoice is an inconvenience. But for L&L Foods, if their delivered products didn't match what appeared on the invoice, they faced the possibility of fines from the customer.
The company’s legacy software had also been customized about 15 years earlier by someone who was no longer at the company to support it. Because of this, as the business evolved, L&L Foods had little ability to update the system or adapt it to new operational requirements. Excel helped fill some of the gaps, but for growing companies with complex needs, spreadsheets can only carry the process so far.
What L&L Foods needed was a modern NetSuite wholesale distribution system it could continue improving—not another platform held together by paperwork, overflowing binders, and institutional memory.
L&L Foods had already begun implementing NetSuite with another provider when it contacted Anchor Group for help. Its scheduled go-live was only one month away, but critical requirements for system go-live remained unresolved.
In some cases, when a requested capability fell outside the original NetSuite implementation partner’s standard scope or required a deeper understanding of L&L Foods’ operations, the project stalled. In other cases, attempted customizations did not reflect how pricing, discounts, order entry, and delivery needed to work in the business.
The Oracle NetSuite implementation had a date on the calendar, but no viable plan for reaching it, meaning that If nothing changed, L&L Foods would not go live.
For Anchor Group, the request by L&L Foods was straightforward: we needed identify the blockers, facilitate the changes needed to fit their wholesale distribution needs, coordinate the remaining work, help the company turn a struggling implementation into a working system, and finish it successfully.
Our engagement began with an easy 20 hours of NetSuite managed services before transitioning to ad hoc support. And because L&L Foods and Anchor Group are both locally based, Anchor Group consultant Nathan Wiley could easily travel to work directly with the team on-site.
Rather than interpreting the company’s processes through another round of calls and screenshots, Nathan could see the physical workflow in-person, review the software alongside the people using it, and understand exactly where NetSuite and the real world had stopped matching.
For L&L Foods, working with NetSuite consultants in Wisconsin meant someone could walk through the warehouse and office, observe the paper-based process, and ask questions while looking at the same screen as the employees who would use the system.
Nathan became the bridge between L&L Foods, NetSuite, and Forward Mobile—the company’s third-party mobile application provider. As the primary NetSuite consultant supporting the rescue, he was able to translate operational requirements into technical needs for NetSuite and the mobile app provider, clarify responsibilities, and helped guide the client on decisions and deliverables required to keep the project moving toward go-live.
We were in a real bind with NetSuite when we contacted Anchor Group, and working with Nathan Wiley completely changed the trajectory of our project. Nathan was extremely helpful, professional, and genuinely took the time to understand what we needed out of NetSuite—not just technically, but from a business perspective.
Kyle Lazarz
L&L Foods
One of the most important parts of the project was integrating NetSuite with Forward Mobile’s Mobile Sales App, allowing for a much easier and time-saving process of processing L&L Food customer orders.
Peace-out, paper binders—sales representatives for L&L Foods can now enter orders on tablets while visiting customer locations, removing the need for representatives to return to the corporate office simply to hand over paperwork or re-enter information from a binder. Thus, what had previously been a manual and time-consuming labor of collecting orders became a streamlined and largely automated workflow:
No duplicate entry. Less driving. Fewer transcription errors. More time available for customers instead of paperwork.
Anchor Group helped coordinate the NetSuite ERP integration by clarifying how NetSuite needed to be configured, communicating L&L Foods’ requirements to Forward Mobile, and closing gaps between the two vendors.
Fact: NetSuite integrations often involve more than connecting two pieces of software. Which means the vendors also need a shared understanding of which system owns the information, how the workflow should operate, and what the end user needs to see. Anchor Group’s NetSuite integration services helped clarify, plan, and keep those conversations moving until the mobile application worked for L&L Foods’ actual use case.
The result was a beautifully connected NetSuite integration that moved order information directly from the sales representative’s tablet into the company’s central system.
Since adopting mobile order entry, L&L Foods has reduced both order processing and data entry time by approximately 40–50%.
That time savings has changed how sales representatives spend a typical day. Instead of losing hours to administrative work, they can now dedicate more attention to introducing new products, developing new customer relationships, and proactively managing their existing accounts.
In other words, the mobile ordering process did more than make order entry faster. It returned time to the activities that drive sales and strengthen customer relationships.
The mobile sales process was only part of the challenge. L&L Foods also needed NetSuite order management to accommodate pricing requirements that are common in food distribution but difficult to manage with native functionality.
In essence, standard NetSuite pricing generally uses the price that's in effect at the time an item is added to a transaction. L&L Foods, however, handles transactions with delivery dates scheduled in advance, and so needed prices and discounts to be determined by at the time of the actual delivery date.
Consider, for example, a product that will be discounted throughout October. A sales representative might enter the order in September for an October delivery. Under the standard NetSuite configuration, the October discount would not necessarily apply because the order was created before the promotional period began.
That would not work for L&L Foods.
To fix this, Anchor Group built a custom pricing and discount management solution that extended NetSuite’s effective-date pricing functionality. Prices and promotional discounts can now update according to the delivery date rather than the date the transaction was entered. Simple yet effective NetSuite customizations that allow the system to more closely reflect how L&L Foods sells and delivers its products. As an added bonus, this NetSuite customization also reduces the need for employees to remember future promotions, manually adjust transactions, or correct pricing after an order has already entered the system.
That distinction may sound small from the outside. But across thousands of products, advance orders, changing prices, and scheduled promotions, it makes an awfully big difference.
Nathan went above and beyond, stepped in exactly when we needed it most, and helped move the project forward in a meaningful way. His expertise, responsiveness, and commitment made a stressful situation manageable and successful. I can’t recommend Nathan and Anchor Group highly enough.
Kyle Lazarz
L&L Foods
Project management support proved just as important as the experienced NetSuite consulting services.
While several workflows depended on NetSuite or a third-party provider completing the next step before anyone else could move forward, L&L Foods did not have the technical knowledge needed to push its software vendors for specific decisions, deadlines, or deliverables. Nathan helped the team recognize those dependencies and communicate what needed to happen next.
He determined which requirements could be handled through configuration, which required NetSuite customizations, and which remained the responsibility of the original provider. Nathan also helped L&L Foods work within its existing contract with its original implementation partner instead of paying to duplicate work unnecessarily.
The company moved from a heavily manual and time-consuming ordering process to a cloud-based platform supported by mobile sales technology. Representatives no longer need to drive back to headquarters to submit paper orders, and employees spend much less time transcribing information into the system.
Removing these manual handoffs also improved data accuracy. Order information now travels directly from the field into NetSuite, reducing the likelihood of discrepancies between the products ordered, delivered, and invoiced.
Just as importantly, L&L Foods now has a platform that can be updated and customized as the company’s needs change. What makes NetSuite for wholesale distributors the most valuable is when it reflects the operational details of the business—not when the business is forced to work around the software.
For L&L Foods, this translates to supporting thousands of products, delivery-date pricing, mobile sales orders, and the everyday realities of a modernized regional food distribution in one connected system.
The operational improvements were meaningful, but one result brought especially welcome relief:
Getting our entire sales team to embrace and commit to a completely new way of taking orders has been incredible. That was my biggest stress relief.
Kyle Lazarz
L&L Foods
L&L Foods did not need someone to tell its team to abandon the way its business worked. Rather, it needed NetSuite support services from people who could understand the business, translate its requirements into NetSuite, and help every connected vendor move in the same direction.
Anchor Group helped turn a go-live date without a plan into a working system, with more accurate orders, less administrative work, and a cleaner route from the customer’s shelf to the final invoice.
Sometimes a rescue requires a dramatic overhaul. Other times, (most times) it simply takes an experienced NetSuite implementation consultant showing up, asking better questions, understanding the core needs, and guiding everyone on the next right steps.
For L&L Foods, that was enough to change the trajectory of the entire project.
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Tagged with ERP Implementation, Wholesale, Distribution
