Carvel is the leading manufacturer of uniquely shaped ice cream cakes and a leading provider of premium soft-serve and hand-dipped ice cream products. With products made fresh daily in the store, the company has more than 326 franchised and food service locations serving delicious, high-quality cakes, novelties, cups, cones, sundaes, and shakes. In addition, the company sells its famous ice cream cakes through over 8,500 supermarket outlets.

“Everything about the wholesale business was new to us – the stores, the products, the markets,” says Steve Gottlieb, Vice President of Planning and Financial Reporting. “We needed a system to tell us how we were doing at the store level and we needed to know in some detail.”

Carvel was using a J.D. Edwards database on an AS/400, “which does a wonderful job of collecting data from our billing system,” notes Hank Baran, Director of Information Systems. “We needed a better way to analyze our sales data. We started looking into some data warehouse solutions, but they were all very cumbersome and no more user-friendly than what we had.”

Then Carvel management looked at Margin Minder, an advanced performance management system developed by Salient Corporation, based in Horseheads, New York. “Margin Minder gives us a good window on how we’re doing in the supermarkets and it allows us a great deal of flexibility in how we look at the data,” explains Gottlieb. Gottlieb goes on to say:

For example, we are very holiday-oriented. An Easter Bunny Cake doesn’t do us a lot of good the day after Easter. We want to know exactly how we did with Easter Bunnies on a store-by-store basis – what went in, what went out, did it sell, did we take returns – so that next year we can do a better job in every store. Salient added this special Average Per Outlet (APO) feature for us, which I understand is now available to everybody in the latest release. That is an excellent way for us to tell, on a relative basis, how well a store is doing. You want to know what the average per store is because it’s the best performance benchmark. We can look at the APO for the Northeast, drill down to the New York metro market, to a chain, to a specific route served by a particular driver, or to a specific product on a certain route. This allows us to do sales comparisons by any aspect of the business over any period of time. When we find a store that is underperforming, we can start to understand the problem and resolve it.