THE GIFT OF TIME:A NEW FLAVOR OF SUCCESS AT
MODERN GOURMET FOODS

Copyright 2017 Centric Software, Inc. All rights reserved.

SEASONALITY AND SHELF SPACE
Since 1998, Modern Gourmet Foods has specialized in the creation of unique, highquality food and beverage gifts under its own brand, and on behalf of householdname license holders like Starbucks, Johnsonville, Hershey’s and Corona.
Headquartered in Irvine, California, the company supplies wholesalers, massmerchants, club stores, and small and specialty retailers throughout the USA, Canada,
Europe and Australia with innovative, seasonal products anchored to key holidays.
“Our industry is a very competitive space,” explains Chief Operating Officer Nadeem
Mumal. “Since we’re vying for a very limited number of dollars over a very limited
period of time, we need to invest heavily in ongoing innovation and design to bringfresh products to the market, and to earn our place on store shelves each season.”Modern Gourmet Foods performs all essential design, product development andfinancial activities in the US, where it sells through a partnership network that includes
Walmart, Target, Costco, and Sam’s Club, and sources and conducts in-country quality
control from an office in Qingdao, China.

DELIVERING PRODUCTS ON TIME
The need to juggle licensed and own-brand product development within extremely
tight delivery windows demands significant coordination and clear communication.
Mumal elaborates, “Not only do we have complexities in our supply chain, with ourCalifornia team needing to work as closely as possible with our 15-person-strong
office in China, we’re also meeting three different sets of requirements each season.”“We have to satisfy retailers’ expectations, using trend analysis to create custom linesthat tick all their boxes. We need to adhere to all the restrictions and brand guidelines
given to us by licensors. And finally, we’re balancing the efficiency and profitability of
our own-brand costing, design, and production processes,” Mumal adds.
Although these were challenges Modern Gourmet Foods was accustomed to meetinghead-on, increasing competition in the holiday gift market was, by early 2015, placing
heightened pressure on the business.

““I know we’ve saved six figures a year in project management time,
simply by having a collaborative system and a single, actionableversion of the truth.
CENTRALIZING PRODUCT DATA

Challenges+ Difficulty balancing processes and priorities
between own-brand and licensed products+ Increasing competition for shelf space
during tight seasonal windows+ No centralization of essential product data
+ Lack of visibility into product lifecycles+ Limited budget and little experience ofadopting new technologies

Copyright 2017 Centric Software, Inc. All rights reserved.

After more than a decade of rapid, organic growth, Modern Gourmet
Foods sought, a centralized enterprise system. Mumal explains,“We’re a relatively small business and we had conducted very few
technology implementations at that time.”“We had no single system to manage our specifications for different
products or to oversee their lifecycles - so our primary tools wereExcel and email. Each department had their own variants – some withextra columns, others with different data fields. We knew we needed
to make a big shift towards something more suitable to streamline
development processes and improve visibility.”
But there was an additional complication; the company’s concrete
calendar mandated that any new technology had to be implemented
rapidly; splitting a single season between new and legacy systems
was simply not an option.

ENTER THE CLOUD
Modern Gourmet Foods were drawn to the concept of cloud-based productlifecycle management (PLM) and quickly discovered Centric Software’s cloud
based PLM solution called Centric SMB. Centric SMB is a SaaS alternative to its
award-winning Centric 8 enterprise PLM solution.
Attracted by the promise of technology road-tested by some of the world’s
biggest brands being made affordable and accessible to them, Mumal and his
team invited Centric to demonstrate their new, subscription-based solution.
“We evaluated vendors against three main criteria: functionality, cost, and what wecall ease of transition,” says Mumal. “Based on Centric’s tailored demonstration,
our team found Centric SMB to be far more intuitive than the alternatives –they could really visualize how they were going to transition from Excel to thiscollaborative, online environment and the benefits of having access to real-timeinformation.”
Mumal and his team chose Centric as their PLM partner in July 2015 and bySeptember of the same year, only 2 months later, the North American andChinese teams were working entirely in Centric SMB.

FAST IMPLEMENTATIONAs well as fulfilling the objective of being fully implemented during the small gap between seasons, the cloud-based nature of Centric SMB appealed to Modern
Gourmet Foods for a variety of other reasons.
“We weren’t looking to build a huge infrastructure and we didn’t want to be tied into maintaining servers and upgrading hardware,” says Mumal. “The cloudbase was critical to us from that point of view because we were not committing to any big upfront costs. It also allowed our teams on the road to access thesystem from anywhere. Whether it’s evaluating designs, sitting with customers during feedback sessions or approving products online, they can now do theirjobs wherever there’s an internet connection.”
The speed of implementation was also vital to securing user adoption with an internal cut-off point for the use of legacy systems set at the start of thecompany’s Fall 2016 development. “We decided early on that we were not going to run a parallel process,” explains Mumal, talking about an approach wherePLM and legacy products are run concurrently for a trial period.
“We set a day for conversion and from that day forward all lifecycle activities had to be in Centric SMB; we wouldn’t accept email or Excel from anyone. We did
this to make sure that our teams used the solution to its fullest, as quickly as possible.”“The greatest challenge is often getting people to change the way they work and our teams were not used to complex transitions, but everybody took to thesystem even faster than we’d hoped,” says Mumal.

RAPID RETURN ON INVESTMENT
During the shortlisting and selection phase, Mumal and his team set out three
expectations that their PLM project would be measured against: centralizationof data, visibility into the product lifecycle and user satisfaction. As he explains,
all three were met:
“We now have everyone on the same page with reliable data across the full
spectrum of materials, packaging, warehousing and distribution. From a visibility
perspective, we have the ability, from anywhere in the world, to make informed
decisions about product costs, approvals and alterations. Finally, we wanted
users to adopt the system quickly and today everyone is doing essentiallyeverything that relates to the product lifecycle in PLM. All three areas where
we expected to save money, become more efficient, or improve visibility havedelivered – it’s night and day based on where we were versus where we aretoday.”
Beyond user satisfaction, Mumal is also able to estimate the monetary savings
that Modern Gourmet Foods has realized through adopting Centric SMB. “Iknow we’ve saved between $70,000 and $100,000 a year in project management
time, simply by having a collaborative system and a single, actionable version ofthe truth,” he says.

Copyright 2017 Centric Software, Inc. All rights reserved.

Results+ Savings of between $70,000 and$100,000 per calendar year throughcollaboration and lead time coordination+ Full implementation on two continents intwo months+ All product data now centralized in asingle collaborative environment+ Full visibility into product lifecycles+ Complete user adoption and satisfaction+ Affordable upfront cost, with noinvestment in infrastructureABOUT MODERN GOURMET FOODS
Modern Gourmet Foods combines creativity with thorough trend analysis to create
gourmet gifts. The company supplies leading North American and international retailers
with food and beverage solutions for each season, emphasizing quality, branded giftsthat are unique, innovative and of exceptional value. Founded in 1998, Modern Gourmet
Foods is based in Irvine, California.

ABOUT CENTRIC SOFTWARE
From its headquarters in Silicon Valley and offices in trend capitals around the world,
Centric Software builds technologies for the most prestigious names in fashion,retail, footwear, luxury, outdoor and consumer goods. Its flagship product lifecyclemanagement (PLM) platform, Centric 8, delivers enterprise-class merchandise planning,product development, sourcing, business planning, quality and collection management
functionality tailored for fast-moving consumer industries. Centric SMB packages
extended PLM including innovative technology and key industry learnings tailored forsmall businesses.
Centric Software has received multiple industry awards, including the Frost & Sullivan
Global Product Differentiation Excellence Award in Retail, Fashion and Apparel
PLM in 2016 and Frost & Sullivan’s Global Retail, Fashion and Apparel PLM ProductDifferentiation Excellence Award in 2012. Red Herring named Centric to its Top 100
Global list in 2013, 2015 and 2016.

655 Campbell Technology Parkway | Suite 200 | Campbell, CA 95008 USA
Phone: 1 408 574 7802 | Fax: 1 408 377 3002
www.centricsoftware.com
Copyright 2017 Centric Software, Inc. All rights reserved.