Saint-Jérôme, Québec, December 11, 2020 ─ For companies who manage their direct-to-store delivery routes using the Companion® Suite, by CIS Group, the time has come to offer their customers a new experience, entering a new age in supply chain communication. An online ordering platform called SKU store is the latest addition to the software suite, so they are able to give their customers the freedom to securely place their orders at any convenient time, from anywhere, and from any device.

The response received has been very good for the companies Browning Harvey Ltd. in Newfoundland & Labrador, Mrs, Dunster’s in New Brunswick, and Nutrinor in Québec – the latter having taken an active part in the Beta phase. All three companies have for many years been using the Companion® Route DSD application

Customer self-registration, secure, and automated, is done in a minute. The user then has access to simple, streamlined layouts, where finding individual SKUs is made easy by the product pictures accompanying the descriptions. The product list can also be conveniently filtered by brand, category, and so on. If interrupted, the customer can always save their order as unconfirmed and complete it later. Simplicity is key, so the learning process for users is minimal.
With this effort to make their customers’ life easier, the companies are at the same time achieving a new level of responsiveness, since replenishment orders are made possible in real-time, and round the clock.

Furthermore, the application is bound to free more and more of the time that telesales employees formerly devoted to calling customers and receiving calls, faxes, and emails, also freeing the time it took to manually enter those orders – and in this last respect, automation means costly errors in manual entry are avoided altogether. Actually, to ensure data integrity throughout the whole financial cycle, most often an interface is also set up between SKU store – integrated with the Companion® Office middleware – and the financial ERP system.

The success of implementation is well illustrated by the words of Mitchell Reid, IT Director at Browning Harvey: “Our customers have found the SKU store application very user-friendly and love that they can place their orders with us from anywhere, anytime.”

About Nutrinor

Located in the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region, Nutrinor is one of the leading food co-ops in Québec. It is involved in four major areas of expertise: the agri-food branch whose brands allow the company to shine throughout the province and elsewhere in Canada; the agricultural branch offering expertise, support and products to the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean farmers to better guide and serve them while encouraging innovation; the energy branch offering fuel, heating oil, propane and propane vehicle conversion services; the hardware branch offering tools and maintenance services.

About Browning Harvey

Browning Harvey Limited, Newfoundland & Labrador’s only soft drink manufacturer, has been in business since 1931, and the exclusive Pepsi bottler in Newfoundland & Labrador since 1944. It provides consistent, dependable, province-wide selling, and delivery service to all areas of Newfoundland & Labrador and employs 220 people locally.

About Mrs. Dunster’s

Mrs. Dunster’s story dates back to the 1960s in Fredericton, New Brunswick. Ingrid Dunster was famous around the neighborhood for her delicious homemade donuts, prepared on the stovetop of her small kitchen. Her husband, Harold, suggested that she sell her donuts to some of the local area stores. Demand continued to grow, and soon the donuts were being distributed to other communities, then other provinces, gaining new fans everywhere they went. Mrs. Dunster’s is now locally owned and operated by the Hyslop Family, purchased by Blair and Rosalyn Hyslop in June 2014. Mrs. Dunster’s sells donuts and other baked goods across the Maritime Provinces and New England.