CPI Interactive Enables Sunrise Growers to Maintain their Competitive Edge and Grow their Business 20 Percent Per Year

BUSINESS CHALLENGE: As one of the largest strawberry growers in the nation, Sunrise Growers has always relied on cutting edge science and technology to help them deliver the best possible product to the market. Their success in the industry recently brought them face to face with a difficult challenge that even the latest innovations in agriculture science and farming technology could not address."

As our strawberry business and sales flourished, we began shipping out of multiple districts, which increased the potential for complex sales order changes throughout the day," explained Ben Bowden, Director of Information Technology at Sunrise Growers. "It became more and more difficult to manage our sales and inventory pipeline. Our legacy systems and traditional tools were no longer adequate to help us make decisions on how to best fulfill our orders and the expectations of our customers.

"The process that Sunrise had traditionally used to keep track of produce and sales relied on spreadsheets and data from a legacy computer system entered by hand. This process was slow and labor intensive. It was also prone to error. "The static paper reports from our legacy system were not giving us data in real time, so our spreadsheets never had the most current data," said Bowden. "When you’re working with many different orders by the minute, many of which will be changed throughout the course of the day, not having real-time information about the availability of your product is a huge issue.

"Because of the inaccuracies inherent to any manual system, the sales team was always working from old data, a situation that lead to what they call "shorts" and "longs," or shortages and surpluses of fresh fruit. "Strawberries are highly perishable, so when they come in from the fields, they need to be cooled and loaded on the truck that same day,” Bowden explained. “Ideally, we don't want to have any holdover for the next day, nor do we want to run short. As our business increases, we continuously need new technology that helps us reach that goal and drive up our bottom line."

WHY CPI INTERACTIVE? Sunrise Growers turned to CPI Interactive, an advanced technology e-business solution provider, for the answer to this increasingly urgent business challenge. CPI Interactive began by performing a complete needs assessment of the functional and interface requirements of the project.