Silver Bay Seafoods Implements NorthScope as Seafood ERP Solution in Two Months

The Challenge

Due to unforeseen issues resulting in the need for a fast but thorough implementation, Silver Bay Seafoods turned to Northlake Partners (NLP) for an implementation of NorthScope in under two months at its five installations. Prior to NorthScope, Silver Bay had been using a combination of older systems and Excel spreadsheets to manage its operations and had run into issues with these systems becoming too cumbersome and also needing updated infrastructure for security reasons. This, paired with their needs to report on consolidated data across all companies and to have a system configured for on and off season use in sites in remote areas, made the transition to NorthScope even more appealing. In addition to these needs, Silver Bay’s top five goals for the initial implementation were to provide a solution that supported:

• Fish Ticket imports from eLandings with automatically applied prices, taxes, and premiums.
• Payments to Fishers.
• Sales to Fishers.
• Import of credit card charges.
• Import of Fisher charges.

Ultimately, Silver Bay chose Northlake due to the combination of capabilities of the software and the team, which was able to meet their deliverables before the start of fishing season, within their budget. NLP brought with them industry-specific expertise that allowed them to work closely as a team and achieve all of Silver Bay’s goals.

The Approach

The NLP and Silver Bay teams worked together to get the SBS systems up and running while making as many baseline setup decisions as possible very quickly in order to meet the deadline. NLP was able to help improve the uniformity of Silver Bay’s chart of accounts and to make the setup of each company as similar as possible while also leveraging some of the NorthScope integrations to upload data into the system from custom templates built for SBS and also pulling a lot of data from eLandings to speed up data entry. For the initial go-live phase, NLP and NorthScope provided:

• System Configuration
• Electronic Fish Ticket processing and Fisher Settlement functionality
• Ability to upload Fisher Credit Card transactions into NorthScope
• Ability to upload AP invoice charges for Fishers into NorthScope
• System training

Following the initial go-live of all facilities, the NorthScope team continued the discovery and implementation process with:

• Additional system training
• System configuration/re-configuration for improvements
• Development of custom reports
• Journal Entry export from NorthScope to the corporate office

The Results

With the strength, experience, and leadership of the Silver Bay team combined with NLP as a partner and NorthScope as a capable and flexible platform, Silver Bay was able to complete their project under some very challenging conditions. The system is setup to grow along with Silver Bay for years to come and with the help of NLP and NorthScope:

• All goals for the initial season’s implementation were met on time and on budget.
• The new system is easier to use and less cumbersome than Silver Bay’s previous platform, allowing users to complete tasks more quickly and having additional time in their day for other things.
• All local plant and corporate reporting goals were met along with the ability to pull consolidated data from the system across all companies at one time.