With five supermarkets (and counting), independently-owned Murphy's Markets is fast becoming a competitor to be reckoned with in the New Jersey grocery store industry. But to harness that growth and streamline productivity, the company needed help getting a better picture of its financials.

The Challenge:
For years Murphy's Markets had been handling its financial and accounting operations the old-fashioned way by compiling sales numbers manually. Even the company's cash registers were out of date. "We were really looking for a cutting edge solution that would allow us to improve our report-generating capabilities and get a better handle on cash flow and costs," explains John Wachter, general manager at Murphy's Markets. "We also wanted to improve our sales figures and forecasting abilities."

Unfortunately for Murphy's and for Wachter, who was promoted to general manager in 2000, the previous general manager wasn't big on information technology. "He was a bit old school," explains Wachter. "So when I got there we didn't have a lot of technology resources to get our financial operations where we needed them to be."

The Solution: Wachter began looking around for some information technology help when he noticed that the store had used one technology provider for some small jobs in the past. That firm was Miles Technologies, one of the Northeast United States' most innovative high tech solutions providers.

"I got together with (company president) Chris Miles and grew quickly convinced that Miles Technologies could handle the job," adds Wachter.

Before long, Miles Technologies was on the job. The Marlton, New Jersey-based provider of highly customizedintegration, networking and Internet services for a wide range of businesses throughout the Delaware Valley and New York Metropolitan area, had already developed a "can do" reputation among area businesses with a knack for tackling tough information technology assignments.

"Right away Miles integrated a computerized cash register system for the store, which for us was a something we hadn't had before and which was a great jumping off point to improve our overall financial management situation," says Wachter. The cash register system, working in networked tandem with the firm's corporate office, automatically generated sales figures and transmitted them into the company's Quickbooks software for storage and analysis.

"Everything feeds off of that system," says Wachter. "We can generate sales reports which tells every department our total sales, credit card income, cash income, and check income. Now we can post all that data straight to our general ledger." Now, every week, Wachter and his staffers have a printout of exactly what money has gone in and gone out of the store. "It's a huge improvement for us," he adds.

Miles Technologies also added a feature to the company's financial systems where vendor invoices are consolidated and sent to the main office in onepackage. That enables the company to get a better handle on what they're paying vendors and streamlines the vendor payment process. Says Wachter, "The vendors love it because they're getting paid more quickly and we love it because we have better cost information and have also managed to slash our accounting costs by 66%."

Murphy's also called on Miles to revamp its archaic inventory system, which was also handled manually. "We'd have top managers coming in on Sunday and literally counting inventory by hand," he says. "Now we have a computer system that does a more accurate job in three hours. We've saved a bundle in labor costs, too."

What Wachter likes best about Miles Technologies is the firm's ability to address a problem creatively and come up with a plan to get the job done, quickly and without problems. "They have the vision to create solutions and the know-how to implement those solutions," he adds. "Miles has some innovative specialists on hand who know what they're doing and get the job done right." He cites another inventory issue, this one concerning Murphy's perishable inventory, where Miles was able to generate a creative solution to a vexing problem. "Before we'd been using the paper-and-pencil approach," says Wachter. "But Miles came in an developed a small hand-held unit and custom programmed it for each of our departments. It worked like a charm."

It's results like that, which lead Wachter to say that Murphy's Markets will continue to count on Miles Technologies for years to come. "We love what Miles Technologies has done for us," he says. "We'll be counting on them for a long time."