Jerry Wilhite, CEO FSIC, Foodservice Supply Chain Visibility

Food  distribution clarified by Jerry Wilhite, CEO FSIC

Background

He worked with U.S. Foodservice for 22 years in all aspects of the food distribution business including: Corporate National Accounts, Division President, VP of Sales, Accounts Payable and Receivables, Purchasing and Operations. Jerry also was a Division President for Food Services of America.

How did you feel about taking a risk to open your own company?

Even today I don’t think of it that way. I think of it as,”I’ve got a job to do, and it started out by looking at the opportunity of how we could help our customers.

What does FSIC do?

• Track products from manufacturer through the operator.
• Bring visibility to the customer so they can make great business decisions. Unfortunately, with invoices, they’re looking at invoice data, they maybe looking at a can, but they don’t really truly understand, “Am I getting the right product from the right vendor at the right price?” and we have the ability to make sure that that happens.

Same problem then, same problem now

• There’s over 8.5% inherent error rate in the industry today. That doesn’t mean dollars, everybody can all equate that and go, “Wow, 8.5% of dollars.”
• It’s 8.5% of all transactions has something different than what the perception of the customer was. Different pack size, different products, different manufacturer, wrong pricing, you name it. There’s a gamut of reasons, but 8.5% of the time something isn’t the way that it was perceived to be when it was purchased.

How does FSIC do it?

We have the ability because we track by manufacture by manufacturer product code, we have the ability and a system setup to capture those variances, put some eyeballs on it, and say, “Does this make sense?

What does it mean to the customer?

• There isn’t a customer we have or we will engage with or bring on that we can’t bring at least a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of savings opportunities to the table.
• They are able to see the metrics that are in supply chain that have never been there before or haven’t had the ability to get to right in front of them teed up every quarter, every month, where they have one sheet they’re able to look at, and look at what the potential problems are

Intellispend

• One of our vertical companies called my IntelliSpend, and what that does is for an up and comer or a new account or a large independent, we have the ability to license software to them that enables them to get that visibility themselves.
• If they are not big enough where we can afford to service them as a company as an FSIC client and all the consulting service that we provide, but it gives them a way to get into the game, at smaller or lower entry fee.

Why is FSIC unique?

• We’re only paid by our client.
• If we don’t give the customer the opportunity and ability to save twice what they pay us the first year, I give their money back because I’ve never wanted to be in our customer’s pocket.

Restitution

• We have a module that’s a contract management module, and what it does is it manages the contract price that a customer should pay for any given period of time whether it’s a month, a day, a week, a year, we load that into our system, and it matches that up against every single transaction off of every single invoice.
• Our client didn’t get the right product or they didn’t get it at the right price or you owe them restitution.” and we show them the report. First thing out of their mouth is, “Wow, where did you get this information?” “Well, it’s the data you provided to us two weeks ago, we just looked at it differently. We looked at the data, and slice and dice it differently, and the way we ask for and again because it originates from manufacturer and manufacturer product, it’s very easy to track that across the country.

Delivery frequency cost

• We educate our customers of all their customer’s accountable to what the agreement is to. The reason is that gives them the ability to drive cost out of the system which then too gives them the ability to lower cost on a go forward basis in new negotiations.
• If they’re telling the distributor, I need two two times a week delivery.” and yet they’re getting three and a half, we make it a point every month to say, “Hey your agreement is two deliveries a week, and in Dallas, Texas, you’re four units were getting three and a half.” Now, there’s also an added cost to the customer because the average delivery cost the customer on average $75 a delivery in soft cost.

Why doesn’t everyone use this?

• I won’t tell you I can do anything for you until I got an opportunity to do, invest in a summary of finding that is free to you, but we make that initial investment. What we do is we pull 90 days’ worth of data from your chosen distributors, we’ll put through our system, we’ll comeback with a summary of findings that tells you what we find and what we’re looking, and how much money that we, first off, that we think we can save.
• Whatever our fee will be on a monthly basis if we don’t save you double that over a 12 month period we’ll give you your money back.  It’s a “no brainer.” There is nothing you need to do except put a signature on a letter of authorization and a signature on a mutual non-disclosure so that you know that we aren’t sharing your data with anybody else, and that is all you need to do.
• Within 30 days, we comeback and show you where there potentially maybe errors. I made a statement that, “If we can’t find any errors I’ll tell you. I have yet to have a customer in 17 years that we couldn’t find at least a quarter of a million dollars in savings.”

What happens in year two and three?

• This business is like a water balloon, once you think you have something under your control and you got it there and all of a sudden it starts slipping off the other end of the table.
• We’ve extended a contract first time in my history that I’ve gone more than year to year, we’ve extended a contract through 2021 with Restaurants Unlimited, my longest tenured account. I started in 2001 and we still get restitution checks. Last month’s restitution or last quarter’s restitution check was $23,000.

This is like Lasik eye surgery, now you can see

• “Wow, I haven’t seen that 25 years.”
• Most of our clients, when they see what we provide them in actionable data, the word is wow. What it is, is it gave you the visibility that you have not had available to you.

email- jwilhite@fsici.com

facebook – https://www.facebook.com/FSICI/

LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/jerry-wilhite-7b183a7b/

Phone – 719-576-3264

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