Silver Bay Seafoods (SBS) is a primarily fisher-owned seafood processing company operating five high-capacity facilities in Alaska and three in California. They process salmon, herring, squid, pollock, pacific cod, halibut, sablefish, and rockfish for domestic and export markets, producing fresh, frozen, and shelf-stable healthy, sustainable seafood products. Founded in 2007 as a single salmon processing facility in Sitka, Alaska, Silver Bay is now one of the largest seafood companies in Alaska, and on the West Coast.
The Challenge
Due to unforeseen issues resulting in the need for a fast but thorough implementation, Silver Bay Seafoods turned to Northlake Partners (NLP) for an implementation of NorthScope in under two months at its five installations. Prior to NorthScope, Silver Bay had been using a combination of older systems and Excel spreadsheets to manage its operations and had run into issues with these systems becoming too cumbersome and also needing updated infrastructure for security reasons. This, paired with their needs to report on consolidated data across all companies and to have a system configured for on and off season use in sites in remote areas, made the transition to NorthScope even more appealing. In addition to these needs, Silver Bay’s top five goals for the initial implementation were to provide a solution that supported:
- Fish Ticket imports from eLandings with automatically applied prices, taxes, and premiums.
- Payments to Fishers.
- Sales to Fishers.Import of credit card charges.
- Import of Fisher charges.
Ultimately, Silver Bay chose Northlake due to the combination of capabilities of the software and the team, which was able to meet their deliverables before the start of fishing season, within their budget. NLP brought with them industry-specific expertise that allowed them to work closely as a team and achieve all of Silver Bay’s goals.
“The NorthScope team has been great to work with – we really appreciate the time and attentiveness they’ve given us as they consistently came with suggestions for solving problems as if they were a part of our team and really invested in our success. Their ability to get our companies up and running in such a short amount of time with a system that is more flexible and easier to use than what we were previously using made a huge difference in what ended up being a record-setting season for us."
The Approach
The NLP and Silver Bay teams worked together to get the SBS systems up and running while making as many baseline setup decisions as possible very quickly in order to meet the deadline. NLP was able to help improve the uniformity of Silver Bay’s chart of accounts and to make the setup of each company as similar as possible while also leveraging some of the NorthScope integrations to upload data into the system from custom templates built for SBS and also pulling a lot of data from eLandings to speed up data entry. For the initial go-live phase, NLP and NorthScope provided:
- System Configuration
- Electronic Fish Ticket processing and Fisher Settlement functionality
- Ability to upload Fisher Credit Card transactions into NorthScope
- Ability to upload AP invoice charges for Fishers into NorthScope
- System training
Following the initial go-live of all facilities, the NorthScope team continued the discovery and implementation process with:
- Additional system training
- System configuration/re-configuration for improvements
- Development of custom reports
- Journal Entry export from NorthScope to the corporate office
The Solution
At the culmination of the speedy implementation, NLP was able to deliver a stable system on time and on budget while meeting Silver Bay’s customization goals that came up after the season started. Additionally, NLP was able to consolidate data for reporting and the system was flexible enough to make some configuration changes after go-live to improve the flow of data entry and reporting. To Silver Bay’s benefit, NorthScope can automatically consolidate data across companies and the overall workflow for entering transactions is more closely designed to match the flow of their business. Also, NLP built some Excel templates for importing large amounts of data to save data entry time whenever possible and for when SBS needed to integrate with their corporate banking system.
The Results
With the strength, experience, and leadership of the Silver Bay team combined with NLP as a partner and NorthScope as a capable and flexible platform, Silver Bay was able to complete their project under some very challenging conditions. The system is setup to grow along with Silver Bay for years to come and with the help of NLP and NorthScope:
All goals for the initial season’s implementation were met on time and on budget.
The new system is easier to use and less cumbersome than Silver Bay’s previous platform, allowing users to complete tasks more quickly and having additional time in their day for other things.
All local plant and corporate reporting goals were met along with the ability to pull consolidated data from the system across all companies at one time.
- All goals for the initial season’s implementation were met on time and on budget.
- Users can complete tasks more quickly and have additional time in their day for other things.
- All reporting goals were met and SBS can pull consolidated data from the system across all companies at one time.
