Meat Commodities, Inc. (MCI) is an established full-line trading and brokerage company in the meat industry who moves over 7 million pounds of meat per week. Additionally, MCI operates a full-service transportation company called MCT and are also representatives for two East Coast beef harvest facilities – one in Pennsylvania and one in North Carolina. This means that MCI has the ability to ship beef, pork, or chicken overnight to anywhere on the Eastern Seaboard. It also means, however, that there are a lot of moving parts to stay on top of, accounting-wise.
MCI’s systems had consisted of a conglomerate of Excel spreadsheets, Access databases, and Datapro. With so many different systems running the business, in several different physical locations, MCI didn’t have insight into real-time information. You need to move quickly when it comes to perishable merchandise, and delays in software mean delays in meat.
MCI needed a solution and fast.
With Acumatica, there is no more hopping from database to database. No more double-checking to ensure accuracy of one system compared to another. No more delays in deliveries (which was especially important during a pandemic AND a nationwide meat shortage).
Meat Commodities worked with their assigned Crestwood Associates team to deliver a robust, cloud-based, shiny new accounting system on time and under budget.
We were able to eliminate all the spreadsheets and Access databases. All transactions are processed with the same centralized system now. One of the biggest strengths of the cloud is the ability to collaborate from anywhere, and know what’s happening in real time. So the folks loading the trucks in Pennsylvania are able to get answers from the staff in North Carolina, if need be. Additionally, Acumatica provides features for account for repackaging, market pricing, and credit checks – everything MCI needs to maintain their current operations and scale.
With Acumatica, MCI can also pull in data for MCT. The transportation business utilized the general ledger and cash management modules in Acumatica and daily GL activity is extracted from their other system and imported directly into Acumatica. Now MCI has comprehensive financial reporting, intercompany transactions, and consolidated financials. Without Acumatica, pulling the two companies together was a tedious and time-consuming manual process.
By leveraging the power of Acumatica, MCI connected all their disparate business systems, eliminated their on-site hardware technology infrastructure (and associated costs), gained real-time visibility into financial operations, and is poised for future growth with a cloud-based system. This adaptability was especially important during 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic shifted the way MCI (and, of course, their customer base) needed to operate. If Meat Commodities, Inc. could weather that storm with Acumatica, they can handle anything.