Building a solid foundation for a better farm-to-table business

The challenge

Significant technical debt

4P Foods committed itself to building a more equitable, resilient, and regenerative regional food system. They reached out to the Solvd team to carry the foundational task of updating its technology infrastructure to allow scaling and support of the many partnerships 4P Foods needed to achieve its mission. 

The main challenge was significant technical debt. All company data was scattered across various systems, making it inaccessible and unconnected. This disjointedness required hours of manual effort to combine into useful information, leading to time-consuming and frustrating activities for employees and customers. The manual processes hindered 4P Foods from expanding into new lines of business and growing its customer and supplier base. 

4P Food’s technology infrastructure lacked an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to integrate company-wide data, an underlying data model for an ERP and sufficient integration protocols to seamlessly communicate data with third-party systems. 

To achieve 4P Foods’ financial and business goals, the company needed to manage all its partnerships and logistics seamlessly. The IT architecture required supporting many partnerships, which was only possible with a robust public portal that offers external APIs.  

The approach

Infrastructure at the core of building the company’s future 

The solution involved three distinct layers to enhance system integration, data consistency, and decision-making capabilities within the organization. These layers include the Foundation, Internal Infrastructure, and Partner Integrations. 

With Solvd support, 4P Foods built an MVP for the foundation and internal structure layer. The foundation included the creation of a data lakehouse using MS Databricks, developing integration adapters to receive raw data, designing a data model, and implementing a three-level (bronze, silver, gold) data storage/data refining process. They also configured MS Power BI, connected it to the data lakehouse, and built vital reports and dashboards for data visualization. Concurrently, the data between their third-party applications were integrated to create a cost-effective, flexible, and modular ERP. Additionally, Solvd’s team researched e-commerce systems, authored a tailored RFP on 4P Foods’ behalf, and guided their selection of suitable vendors to replace their existing system. 

The outcome

Business impact of digital transformation 

With the foundational layer and part of the internal structure layer in place, 4P Foods experienced significant improvements in its sales, procurement, warehousing, and delivery processes. Tasks that used to consume many hours daily, such as planning a delivery route or loading trucks for optimal capacity, now take mere minutes. This efficiency resulted in more timely deliveries with less fuel and fewer trucks, leading to cost savings for 4P Foods. The staff is also happier and more productive in their roles. As Solvd continues to implement the rest of the roadmap, 4P Foods can look forward to further increases in operational productivity and the opening of new revenue channels, all within their schedule and budget.