NorthScope Saves Greenhead Lobster Time and Money and Improves Fishermen Relations by Providing Industry-Specific Functionality
The Company
Greenhead Lobster is a family-owned business that focuses on wild-caught Stonington, Maine lobster. On the docks daily since 1997, their lobsters are sourced by a fleet of local, independent lobstermen and women. With multiple tank rooms and a state-of-the-art HPP processing facility, Greenhead Lobster takes pride in maintaining quality and food safety in every step of handling. Greenhead Lobster is recognized across the country and worldwide for its quality lobster.
The Highlights
Daily time savings by automating manual processes and providing easily accessible data for analysis.
Improved fishermen relations by providing industry-specific functionality for buying lobster directly from fishermen.
Money saved by preventing the need for custom software.
The Challenge
Prior to its partnership with Northlake Partners (NLP), Greenhead Lobster had been using a combination of NetSuite, Excel, and manual workarounds to manage buying lobster and selling bait/fuel to fishermen, settling with the accounts, and analyzing each step of the process. They either needed to find a system designed to manage all of this or pay to develop a custom solution that integrated with their legacy system.
NorthScope solved Greenhead’s challenges by providing out-of-the-box functionality that manages all the transactions they do with their fishermen, provides the analysis tools they needed, and contains reports required for regulatory agencies. Moreover, all this functionality within NorthScope is simple and easy to understand without the need for cumbersome and manual workarounds.
Finally, NorthScope’s ability to integrate with Greenhead’s legacy system proved that NorthScope would not only solve Greenhead’s current challenges but help prevent new ones from coming up.
The Approach
The implementation was aimed at accomplishing Greenhead’s five main goals:
- Manage lobster purchases with a transaction designed for the job that could also automate all applicable taxes and/or deductions.
- Record all the details of the Lobster tickets in an easy to use, simple transaction.
- Manage sales of bait and fuel to fisherman.
- Compute real-time fisherman balances and perform fisherman Payments/Settlements.
- Integrate data to their legacy system modules:
- Purchases and sales to Inventory
- Fisherman payments to Payables
- Tickets to the General Ledger
Greenhead was taken through an initial discovery process that allowed NLP to map out the implementation. NLP walked Greenhead through each step of the implementation including configuration, training, and providing additional assistance during the go-live cut-over.
The Solution
With NorthScope, Greenhead is now able to easily manage the lobster buying and fisherman relation side of their business in a single, easily accessible system that integrates data into their legacy accounting system.
NorthScope provided Greenhead with Lobster tickets that automatically calculate prices, accrue bonuses, and that contain all the information needed to analyze lobster purchases. Fisher Sale transactions record the bait and fuel sold to fishermen enabling them to see real-time fishermen balances and perform settlements.
All this, coupled with the reports and analysis built for the fishing industry, Fisherman Statements and other fishermen transactions, NorthScope was able to provide Greenhead with a unique solution catered to their challenges that they could not find in other systems.
The Results
By implementing NorthScope, Greenhead avoided additional time and expense required to customize their legacy system as well as the higher long-term expense of supporting custom software. Their users also get all the reports they previously had to manually create or collect from several places, quickly and easily from within NorthScope.
The Review
NorthScope has greatly improved this side of our business while at the same time simplifying our processes and reducing the manual effort that was required.
Lauren Davis-Jones, Controller
