Case Study: Daybreak Eggs (Dagbreek Eiers)

Several weeks ago, we had the opportunity to sit down with De Wet van Jaarsveldt, CFO at Daybreak Eggs, as part of our routine Customer Success Management checkins. We liked the company and their story so much, we decided to package this case study …

About Daybreak Eggs

Established in 2001 by Johan van der Schyff in Plettenberg Bay with a vision of being the preferred egg supplier in the Western Cape and Eastern Cape provinces in South Africa,  Daybreak Eggs strives to optimize value for the benefit of their customers and communities. In 2019, Johan van der Schyff won the Toyota South Africa Agri Young Farmer of the year award.  At present there are three production farms with pack stations located in Plettenberg Bay, Humansdorp and Port Alfred which produce 1,400,000 dozen eggs per month. Critical business factors include economic, social, and environmental sustainability, good corporate governance and adherence to food safety regulations. Daybreak Eggs is a member of Toplay Eggs who supply and pack the TopLay brand, and most house brands of various major retail outlets with eggs produced by grain fed layers.

Their values are innovativeness, service delivery, suppliers of eggs we can trust, valuing relationships with their customers, and conducting business with integrity and commitment.

Key Challenges

In 2019, Daybreak Eggs made a business decision to implement Acumatica ERP coming from Sage Pastel Partner. The reason they chose Acumatica was for the business to continue growing by automating manual processes, customizing processes to the business requirements, to give more employees access to the system from any location as well as to have safe storage of data. They introduced Velixo a few months later for the following reasons:

• Inefficient data entry – The volume of data was a challenge… Due to the nature of the business, Daybreak Eggs has a complex pricing structure with constantly changing data. Their team had to create sales price worksheets in Excel, then copy and paste the copious amount of data into their ERP. Manual data entry was not efficient enough to keep up with the growing amount of data.
• Manual report design – Building financial reports to properly track this data was time-consuming, inflexible and prone to human error.
• Month-end journals – some processes were too manual, such as the calculation and processing of complex month-end journals for biological assets, production costs, pack station costs and payroll.
• Inability to produce some reports – One of Daybreak Egg’s biggest challenges was the inability to generate reports for monthly management accounts within Acumatica. “The ARM reports were not sufficient due to the level of details and data needed in Egg production. Daily data of eggs produced, feed consumption, water consumption, and chicken mortality are all key performance indicators that provide crucial insight into business growth.” says De Wet.

The Velixo Difference

• Efficiency & Flexibility – After using Velixo, Daybreak Egg’s team discovered the efficiency Velixo offered by seamlessly integrating with Excel and Acumatica. This allowed them to build more detailed and dynamic reports. As a result, De Wet van Jaarsveldt said he made “one of the best decisions in his career” to use Velixo for all their financial reporting needs.

Key reports include: Income Statement; Balance Sheet; Cost Analysis for production, pack station, fleet and maketing cost per dozen; Profitability Analysis. De Wet was kind enough to share some of his reports’ layout in PDF for the community.

• Data Entry Automation – Velixo supported Daybreak Eggs in reducing manual work during pricing data updates by automating the ERP data entry using Generic Writeback. With the click of one button, Daybreak Eggs was able to writeback thousands of customer sales price list transactions from Excel directly into Acumatica.
• Data Automation on custom objects for better decision making – Seeing the possibilities and value the Generic Writeback function provided, Daybreak Eggs also began using it for inputting  data, such as: diesel consumption for trucks as expenses with data points such as refuel date, number of litres etc. Generic Writeback allowed them to write this data back to their ERP, and report on many more metrics such as cost per vehicle, allowing them to make better decisions.

“With Velixo, data entry can be fully automated. For example, transaction data from our fleet management solution, such as diesel purchases, is imported into Excel and then seamlessly  pushed into Acumatica using Velixo, bypassing manual entry entirely.” says De Wet van Jaarsveldt

• Report distribution – Ability to send hundreds of emails of pricelists to customers and sales team members directly from Excel, using the Distribution List and Distribute features.
• Visibility & Auditing – “There’s so much more detail now. We can identify exceptions and manage exceptions better, on a daily basis instead of monthly. The value created is huge!” says  De Wet van Jaarsveldt.

Favorite features

De Wet praised almost every feature of Velixo, but particularly highlighted the following ones:

• Generic Writeback  – the Velixo integration with Acumatica’s Import Scenarios, coupled with  Velixo’s very own Import Scenarios allow everyone to rapidly import data into Acumatica using generated data input forms. In addition to these input forms, Velixo supports a Generic Writeback function that can be integrated in any report.
• Journal Writeback – This feature enables the creation of Journal transactions directly in Acumatica, from any Velixo report.
• The GI and GIFILTER functions – Velixo’s Generic Inquiry functions can query any Generic Inquiry in Acumatica, including the Generic Inquiries that Velixo deploys out-of-the-box into Acumatica. This allows users to analyze any Acumatica data, right from Excel!
• Distribution List – a feature that lets users generate reports as PDF or Excel files without formulas and distribute them to users, with a single click. Additional options include the ability to select only specific sheets of a workbook, or filter reports at generation time (by company, branch, division, financial period, etc) on top of Acumatica’s very own data security.

What’s next for Daybreak Eggs

Daybreak Eggs plans to continue using Velixo for even more data entry processes, to support additional reports. Some would be created using Velixo and some others would be created as highly interactive dashboards using Power BI, which Velixo integrates with.

We’re wishing Daybreak Eggs and De Wet all the best and the entire Velixo team is grateful for their business and the time they afforded us for this case study.