north texas food bank
Overview
The North Texas Food Bank is the largest Food Bank in Texas and a certified member of America's Second Harvest National Food Bank Network, which is the nation's largest domestic hunger relief organization. The North Texas Food Bank works to address the critical issue of hunger in the North Texas area by securing donations of surplus unmarketable, but wholesome, foods and grocery products for distribution through a network of charitable organizations dedicated to feeding the hungry in 13 North Texas Counties. It services over 350 local charitable agencies to provide food and other supplies, distributing over 37 million pounds of food to more than 1.7 million people in need in year 2006 alone. Incidentally, NTFB is also the first Food Bank to go live with the Aidmatrix software.
The previous agency ordering process required NTFB to send a broadcast FAX to their hundreds of agencies every Monday on items in inventory. Agencies would then FAX back item requests by the next day and pick up those items the following week from NTFB. This process had several limitations including high administrative costs, inability for agencies to accurately view food bank inventory, lack of visibility into their allocation until they come to the food bank for pick up, and cumbersome reporting processes. Often, due to the lack of timely visibility, some agencies ended up spending as much as $10,000 each month on supplemental food purchases!
Objective
The goal was to:
Provide real-time agency visibility into the NTFB inventory
Provide agency visibility into NTFB approved orders
Eliminate the need for paper/FAX processes
Eliminate the manual order entry process at NTFB
The estimated value was to result in a 50% increase in Agency Order Fill Rates, 25% improvement in NTFB Customer (Agency) Service Levels, 10% reduction in Overall Spend for agency supplemental purchases, and 10% reduction in Administrative Costs for NTFB, touching over 800,000 lives within the first year of operation.
Solution and Implementation
The enabling technologies and applications were integrated with Microsoft Navision, which is the mid-market ERP package being used by NTFB for inventory management. The accompanying business process changes included getting the agencies to use online ordering. Several customizations were implemented on the software services to simplify the workflow and make the applications more user-friendly. End user demos were arranged at regular intervals and incremental requirements were gathered and implemented. The users saw the solution evolve gradually and they felt intimately involved in the development thereby gradually overcoming the "fear" of new technology.
Results
As Jan Pruitt, Executive Director - NTFB, puts it, "The value that Aidmatrix brings to the Food Banks is that of saving time and saving resources." NTFB has been 'live' for 5 years with hundreds of agencies, conducting 500+ transactions each week. Aidmatrix also helped NTFB win Food Bank of the Year in 2001. The program also spurred the organizations to come together to design the first online "Virtual Food Drive" - subsequent development has provided recognition in BusinessWeek, The Nonprofit Times, and other media outlets. The successor to this project, The Virtual Aid Drive(TM) has raised millions of dollars for food banks and other charities in the USA and around the globe.
The end result is best summed in a another statement by Jan Pruitt, "Aidmatrix has helped us take a quantum leap forward."