RJ Deli Provisions
Charlotte, NC

Customer Profile
RJ Deli Provisions, owned by Ray Baldelli, is a full line Boar’s Head distributor who started the business 25 years ago in Long island, NY and has since made the move to the Charlotte area. They have enjoyed continued growth over the years to where they now serve a customer base of more than 150. They have been a FoodConnex user since 2002.

Business Challenge
Prior to 2002, RJ Deli was manually weighing product, which was causing costly errors. “My focus”, says Ray “was to find an operating system that would allow us to eliminate the costly catch weight errors that had plagued us for years. We would weigh products by hand, pencil in weights on cutting tickets and then pull out a calculator to manually figure out the totals. Consequently we were experiencing catch weight errors that were costing us profits every day. But the other side of the coin was that I didn’t want to trade off any cost savings that software would bring me with the need and additional cost of an IT department. So we were also looking for software that could operate without requiring a full time IT department.”

Our Solution
What sold Ray and the rest of the RJ Deli team was FoodConnex’s full capabilities, particularly the SWAMI module (Scan, Weigh, And Measure Instantly). “SWAMI sold us hands down with all of its catch weight capabilities and ease of use, said Ray. “And those were the key attributes that I was looking for to help make my business be the best it could be. The bottom line, now we’re more accurate in our staging procedures and have significantly reduced the amount of run backs as a result of miss picking. It’s been such an improvement for us over the past five years.”

Now RJ Deli uses FoodConnex for everything from invoicing, general ledger, inventory re-ordering, and especially SWAMI.

Positive Business Results
Ray continues, “After we implemented SWAMI, we saw an immediate reduction in errors. The scanning capabilities and electronic processing that allowed us to weigh products on a scale and send all the information directly to the server has enormously reduced our errors and dramatically sped up work process as a whole—making our employees more productive than they’ve ever been while reducing costing mistakes by over 20% in the first few months alone. In addition, the SWAMI module allows us to automatically capture weights and product information and transfer data into the FoodConnex system for rapid invoice generation.”

Ray is further expanding his automation with the addition of FoodConnex’s Tablet OE module.
“The Tablet OE module is going to be an extremely innovative time and labor saver for my company. Now a salesperson can beam in the order directly to the FoodConnex server and in doing so eliminate the need for us to hire extra people to receive orders via the telephone. I know I can count on a return on my investment within two years maximum. Another real benefit of the Tablet OE module is it also reduces the misplaced blame we were experiencing before on incorrect orders and the “he said, she said”. Each salesperson is now completely responsible for their own orders and if we discover a small error it’s quick and easy to trace it back and fix it before it turns into something more serious.”

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