The team at Seacore Seafood is passionate about delivering the world’s freshest, locally sourced seafood, fish and live lobsters to its customers throughout North America. Its extensive network of inward and outward logistics allows Seacore to buy seafood directly from the source—whether it’s trailer trucks picking up fresh fish in New England, flights arriving from the Philippines and Europe or shipments from Asia and South America.  This allows Seacore to provide a wide variety of fresh, high-quality seafood including crab legs from Alaska, barramundi from Australia and salmon from the shores of Ireland.

Seacore’s commitment to quality has caused its business to grow dramatically over the past five years. To better manage that growth while keeping up with customer demand, Seacore automated nearly all of its core business functions—including inventory management, accounting, route management,  order entry, logistics and retail point of sale—by implementing new ERP software from VAI. 

“We needed to automate our inbound and outbound logistics to better manage more than 5,000 fresh and frozen items in inventory,” says Sal Battaglia, director of operations, Seacore Seafood. “At the same time, we wanted to make Ocean Prime—one of our top consumer brands—more available across North America. By automating nearly every part of our business through S2K ERP software, we were able to grow our business by 15 percent year over year.”

Battaglia says the installation has freed up his team to focus on sales and customer service instead of wasting extra cycles on the manual execution of accounting, logistics, and inventory and warehouse management. 

Now, 85 percent of Seacore’s account receivables are current. The S2K package also has helped Seacore hasten its truck routing process by 50 percent, ensuring prompt customer delivery. The new software lets Seacore executives see all their orders, as well as the number of orders per route, and helps them make the best decisions on how to set up the deliveries most efficiently. Through automation, Seacore also has reduced its order picking time by 40 percent.

In addition, the software has automated and streamlined the fish cutting process, eliminating four time-consuming steps, making it 80 percent faster. It also delivers up-to-the-minute consolidated financials with the push of one button, so Seacore can instantly see how retail sales are doing hour to hour or minute by minute each day.

The S2K software has improved inventory accuracy too. The company oversees three distinct seafood brands—Ocean Prime, Fisherman’s Depot and Seafood Depot— all of which must share a master inventory. With the S2K ERP software, when one Seacore brand uses an item purchased by another brand, an automatic transfer is made, and the inventory in the ledger accounts is auto-adjusted to keep everything in balance.

“The S2K installation improved every part of our business, enabling us to continue our impressive growth trajectory while knowing our business is running as smoothly and accurately as possible,” says Battaglia.

For more information: Diane Dady, 800-824-7776, ddady@vai.net, www.vai.net.