Leading Food Service Company Chooses Comshare Management Planning and Control.

Gordon Food Service Inc. (GFS), based in Grand Rapids, Mich., is the largest privately held food service distributor in America, with annual revenues of $1.65 billion. The company employs 4,500 people and has been in business for 101 years. GFS's food service distribution range reaches across

Gordon Food Service chose Comshare[R] Inc., a leading provider of management planning and control applications, to get the job done. Comshare BudgetPLUS[TM] 3.0 would run on its Oracle database and link to the desktops of 120 of its managers via client/server and Web technology. This strategic decision would empower the company's decision makers to analyze the data and generate reports themselves.

Giving analytic and reporting power to GFS managers

"Most of our managers did not like the budgeting system we had - it was inflexible, time-consuming, difficult to navigate, and was lacking in forecasting capabilities," says Jeff VanDyke, finance manager for Gordon Food Service. "Using Comshare BudgetPLUS, our managers can budget their HR expenses, the depreciation from new assets expenses, and their departmental expenses. In addition, our sales branch managers will be able to forecast sales based on historical data and then analyze the results and make modifications."

Comshare BudgetPLUS 3.0 is an application with unique capabilities to help organizations plan, report, and analyze better and faster. BudgetPLUS is designed to exploit both client/server and Web-architected technology that allows users to tap into a central database. BudgetPLUS also can take data directly from existing transactional and ERP systems. "We examined quite a few different budgeting software packages. Most of them, however, were unable to handle our large and complex data structures***;' says VanDyke. "We chose Comshare BudgetPLUS 3.0 running on Oracle because it fits our expertise and our data warehouse that is stored in an Oracle relational database. We liked the technology and direction Comshare is following - client/server and Web technology with a relational database. The Web-architected design and Comshare's willingness to fully understand what we wanted to do with our new budgeting system also helped us make our decision."