Expedite Operations with an Inventory and Order Management System
Trifecta helped Carlo’s Bakery navigate an unprecedented surge in sales with a strategic overhaul of their management systems, increasing productivity and reducing costs.
Services Provided
Consulting & Implementation, Custom Salesforce Development, Salesforce Architecture, Project Management, Business Analysis, Information Architecture
The Story
Background:
Carlo’s Bake Shop is perhaps best known for being featured on the TLC Show Cake Boss. However, the company’s history pre-dates the show by several decades to 1963 when the Valastro family purchased the bakery from Carlo Guastaffero. The family-owned bakery, currently run by Buddy Valastro Jr., is located in Hoboken, NJ and specializes in baked goods of all types. Buddy’s innovative cake decorating skills caught the eye of celebrities, magazines, and network television alike, which led to appearances on the Food Network. Executives at TLC pitched Cake Boss, which became an instant hit, and has inspired several spin-off shows, such as Cake Boss: Next Great Baker and Buddy’s Bakery Rescue.
Challenge:
For the first 100 years of its existence, Carlo’s Bake Shop had little visibility into their raw materials and semi-finished goods. The success of TLC’s reality TV show ‘Cake Boss’ resulted in a huge demand and increase in orders. The bakery needed technology that would help them keep track of inventory, automate manual processes to digitally manage products and inventory, and a robust product catalog to provide consistent pricing and accurate data for all products sold.
As ‘Cake Boss’ grew bigger, so did the Carlo’s brand. Within a few years, they opened multiple locations across the United States which meant they needed a way to manage the products and inventory for all of the bakeries through one centralized distribution facility. The biggest challenge was to generate a method to track order statuses and meet the increased demand while tracking their inventory.
As ‘Cake Boss’ grew bigger, so did the Carlo’s brand. Within a few years, they opened multiple locations across the United States which meant they needed a way to manage the products and inventory for all of the bakeries through one centralized distribution facility. The biggest challenge was to generate a method to track order statuses and meet the increased demand while tracking their inventory.
Carlo's Bake Shop was in need of an integrated and highly scalable solution to sustain their rapid growth.
Our Work
Strategy:
Trifecta developed solutions on the Salesforce platform for an integrated product catalog, order processing, consultation/specialty cake order management, inventory management, and store replenishment. A custom Heroku-integrated solution provided bi-directional flow of product and order data between Salesforce and Magento eCommerce.
Carlo’s now has a centralized and accurate repository of all products which provides their customer service team with a 360-degree view of customers and their orders within Salesforce.
Carlo’s now has a centralized and accurate repository of all products which provides their customer service team with a 360-degree view of customers and their orders within Salesforce.
Working in conjunction with the Carlo’s Bakery design team, Trifecta developed an online consultation reservation solution that provided Carlo’s consultants with customer information before the face-to-face consultation appointment.
The Results
Results:
Trifecta’s solutions significantly improved efficiency for the entire business – including acquiring, managing and selling inventory. The new procurement system allows Carlo’s staff to leverage supplier relationships and effectively automate business processes. Their inventory system tracks raw materials for finished products sold across all Carlo’s Bake Shop retail stores and outlets. Carlo’s reps now have the ability to take orders for multiple locations through a single order management system. The cloud-based cake consultation solution has increased productivity, reduced costs, and improved the customer experience. The icing on the cake: Trifecta’s solutions gave Carlo’s Bake Shop scalable resources to handle new sales volumes, which they saw rise by 1,000 percent.
“Trifecta has been an exceptional partner. The integrated solutions they developed on the Salesforce platform have transformed the way we do business and will improve the efficiency of our entire operation.”
Leo Minervini, CIO, Carlo’s Bakery