BPM addresses a cornucopia of processes at Festival Foods

Festival Foods has implemented a business process management (BPM) system to address a wide range of needs including inventory, purchase order reconciliation, procurement and onboarding. The company selected technology from BP Logix to automate and streamline its key processes.

A family-and employee-owned company, Festival Foods operates 22 full-service supermarkets, as well as Sentry Foods, and has plans to open more stores. It employs 5,850 full- and part-time associates at locations in Minnesota and Wisconsin. While the company emphasizes good customer service, many of its back-office processes were manual and vulnerable to human error. One such process involved receiving groceries, scanning invoices and reconciling what was received with the invoices. That core process sometimes required reconciliation and correction downstream.

Mike Nomland, director of IT for Festival Foods, says, “Rather than build a solution in house, we wanted to automate the workflow and standardize our process. In that way, IT could continue to work on longer-term, visionary projects.”

To ensure consistent and accurate results, Nomland wanted the new system to be automated, scalable, efficient and able to be standardized across all stores. After completing a four-month review of available solutions, Nomland recommended implementing a BPM solution, and the company then selected Process Director from BP Logix.

Currently rolling out the company’s first process, Nomland is looking ahead to other processes such as onboarding, procurement, tying into equipment providers and contract management.

Nomland says, “We didn’t want to hire a bunch of developers to queue up requests. We wanted a solution we could drive to the business users and avoid the IT backlog. Process Director is not a one-off solution. It can be used for anything you can put your imagination to.”

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