Although Garner Foods is based in South Carolina, they sell hot sauce and Green Mountain Gringo brand products all over the world. With digital tools, their projects are easily managed remotely, and team members can work from anywhere.
Garner Foods chose Microsoft 365 Business to easily onboard new employees and to secure company data stored on countless devices. With employees and sales executives traveling all over the United States, being able to securely work and collaborate from any device has played a huge role in the company’s ongoing success.
Using Microsoft 365 Business
The small family business moved to the cloud to coordinate communication across four physical locations and a mobile sales force. With Microsoft 365 Business, Garner reduced its provisioning time for new devices from eight hours to less than two while consolidating vendors and offering employees access to apps and data across platforms.
Up to this date, Garner Foods has around 116 employees and big commitments to filling orders for millions of bottles of sauces all over the world. The company operates 6 production lines to make sauces and tortilla strips. Employees are spread across 4 company locations, and the company’s sales representatives live and travel all over the United States. In a typical day, workers order and receive raw materials, manage finance and marketing, ship finished items, and dream up new products. Ongoing collaboration across locations is crucial for keeping the production lines humming, the supply chain working well, and for meeting rigorous food safety standards.
Solution capabilities in Microsoft 365 Business
Microsoft 365 Business was an immediate hit with IT staff. Brad Everts, IT Supervisor at Garner Foods, liked the simplified management that comes with a complete, integrated IT package. He notes that if Garner had gone with multiple cloud service providers, that would mean more administrative overhead.
Today employees use Outlook for email, Skype for Business for video calls, OneNote, Yammer, and Microsoft Teams to collaborate through chat, notes, and documents. Workers send prefabricated shipment forms every day to customers and suppliers using Word. Everything is shared and saved via SharePoint Online and OneDrive online file storage. Employees also scan and save invoices in SharePoint and link them to Microsoft Dynamics NAV, its enterprise resource planning solution. “We love Excel, too—our entire operations department depends on it every day,” says Garner.
Garner is impressed with the variety of solution capabilities in Microsoft 365 Business and how they all work together across different devices.
Time and money savings with Microsoft 365 business
“With Microsoft 365 Business, we’ve cut our onboarding time for new employees from about a day to less than two hours to get everything done and hand them their devices to start working,” says Everts.
Enterprise-grade security features
Everts says he sleeps better at night because of built-in security features like Windows Defender. “What I like about Windows 10 is the incredibly high degree of safety and security we get for our business,” says Garner. “Microsoft has taken all these security concepts from over the years and found a way to include them in Windows 10 to match our needs.”
