AmerCareRoyal, LLC Utilizes VAI’s S2K Enterprise OnCloud to Strengthen Cloud Presence and Warehouse Management Operations

By AIT News Desk On Feb 1, 2021

VAI provides AmerCareRoyal, LLC with cloud-based distribution and warehouse management solution to enhance its warehouse operation

VAI, a leading ERP software developer, announced that AmerCareRoyal, LLC, the industry leader for trusted quality disposables used in the food service, janitorial, sanitation, industrial, hospitality and medical industries, is leveraging VAI’s S2K Enterprise OnCloud software to increase productivity in its warehouse operations and achieve greater visibility into product inventory.

With over 6,000 front-to-back-end restaurant products, and three locations in Texas, Pennsylvania, and South Carolina running on S2K Enterprise – with its Ontario, Canada location to be live on S2K soon – AmerCareRoyal depends on S2K Enterprise OnCloud to respond to customer needs extremely fast. During the onset of the pandemic in March 2020, AmerCareRoyal rolled out an inventory allocation process for the company’s personal protection equipment (PPE) products in less than two weeks. Using the flexibility of the S2K ERP detailed inventory management capabilities, they were able to prevent inventory of the company’s loyal, long-term customers from being depleted by pandemic-driven spot buys.

The company had been running its S2K ERP applications on-premises and migrated to VAI’s Cloud in August 2020. Since moving to S2K Enterprise OnCloud, AmerCareRoyal has shifted the company’s focus from ongoing activities, such as server management, to focusing on running the business, leaving the technology to VAI. AmerCareRoyal has also added further automation to its warehouse processes.

“Our Exton warehouse was not utilizing RF picking for outbound orders,” said Jeff DeSandre, CIO at AmerCareRoyal. “The business had wanted it for three years and we were able to deliver this in January 2021 because of the available time that moving to the VAI Cloud gave our IT team. I attribute this as a major win for the business and direct result of S2K Enterprise OnCloud hosting powered by IBM technology. There are quantifiable results – prior to moving to the VAI Cloud and enabling RF scanning, our last physical inventory at our Exton, PA location had a variance of 4.5%. We have shown the RF picking to alleviate close to 99% of our accuracy issues. My estimation is our accuracy will increase at least 300% as a result and we are expecting a variance rate of less than 1% next year. We think we can tie this fix to substantial operating cost savings for this warehouse. We are in the process of replicating this to all of our other warehouses and expect similar operational efficiency gains.”

The company is now in the process of implementing VAI S2K Warehouse Management Software along with RF picking in its two larger warehouses in Summerville, SC and Ft Worth, TX. Since 2014, AmerCareRoyal has added seven acquisitions, and is centering its efforts around consolidating to VAI S2K Enterprise OnCloud. With annual sales growing by 20%, the company leverages VAI’s unique unlimited user licensing to add users without additional licensing costs. “The licensing model is extremely compelling in that we do not have to consider excess ERP costs when analyzing an acquisition outside of the normal costs of integration. The model drastically increases our ROI on our ERP investment shifting us away from the industry paradigm of costs increasing with growth. Our ERP costs per sales dollar decreases as we bring more entities onto our ERP. This is something I have not encountered in the past as I am accustomed to dealing with user, sales, shipment volumes, and a plethora of other cost metrics with other ERP providers.”

“Moving to VAI’s Cloud has been at the heart of AmerCareRoyal’s IT strategy, said Todd Endsley, Vice President of Technology, VAI. “Since moving to VAI’s Cloud, the company has shifted its focus on optimizing its S2K ERP software toolset and building out its own internal team with expertise on the S2K product suite. The company has also cut costs since moving to VAI’s Cloud, increasing its resiliency and redundancy with the cloud’s built-in high availability and disaster recovery, with a 15-minute recovery time objective and a no-loss recovery point objective.”

“In the event of a disaster, we no longer have the risk of losing millions in orders because of an outage,” Jeff continued. “This was a risk prior to the deployment of VAI’s Cloud and we had past occurrences where we lost hundreds of orders due to system outages. We now have instant disaster recovery that we did not have before. We still utilize VAI consulting for heavy lifting as they are the experts on cloud computing and their product line. But our relationship has changed to more of a strategic partnership rather than a tactical support partner. I believe the shift to the VAI Cloud set the groundwork for this as it allowed further investment in the AmerCareRoyal IT team becoming experts in S2K product versus keeping lights on.”

Looking ahead, the company plans to partner further with VAI to utilize S2K’s embedded CRM functionality and B2B S2K eBusiness solution to further improve its commercial business model tying together pricing, quoting, order management, fulfillment, rebates and billback all on a single platform. The B2B functionality will allow AmerCareRoyal to extend the logic used internally within S2K to its customer base accessing the B2B portal.