Food and Beverage Distributor Targets a 5-Day Month-End Close

Customer: PE-Backed Food & Beverage Distributor

Customer size: Medium (50 – 999 employees)

Country: United States

Industry: Food & Beverage Distribution

Products and services: Dynamics 365 Business Central, Microsoft Azure, Power Platform, Microsoft 365

Faster Financial Visibility (Targeted):

Month-end close previously averaged about 15 days. The program's goal is about a 5-day close as inventory consumption becomes more accurate and reconcilable.

Earlier Performance Signal:

Leadership expects a flash P&L that is about 85 to 90% accurate, enabling mid-month course corrections instead of end-of-month surprises.

Operational Adoption Unlock:

Plant teams now capture data in a way that reflects real production, building trust that system inventory matches reality and reducing offline tracking and manual checks.

Executive Summary

A high-volume food and beverage distributor backed by a private equity firm partnered with Volt Technologies to make Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central a single source of truth across finance and operations. The company has a long record of growth, expanding into multiple regional production markets, and that growth brought complexity its systems were not keeping up with. After nearly five years of effort, Business Central worked well for finance but had little traction on the plant floor.

Volt brought a structured, programmatic approach and deep accounting and Business Central expertise to align workflows with how the business actually runs and how leadership measures performance. The result is stronger operational buy-in, more reliable inventory and production data, and a clearer path to profitability insight across customers, products, and facilities.

Customer challenges

The company had invested significant effort in Business Central, but most of the usable functionality lived in finance. Operational workflows were immature and produced little meaningful insight. Plant teams did not trust inventory accuracy, relied on offline spreadsheets, and saw system entry as a chore because the data never came back to them as useful performance feedback. For the owners, a critical blind spot remained: knowing with confidence which customers and products drive healthy margins, and which should be improved or deprioritized. Slow month-end closes, driven by inventory consumption and reconciliation complexity, made that blind spot harder to fix.

Partner solutions

Volt partnered with the company and its private equity owner using a programmatic approach: strong governance, the right mix of functional and technical expertise, and a disciplined execution plan built for lasting adoption. Volt redesigned operational workflows to make plant-floor data capture easier and more useful, replacing brittle custom workflows with processes that reflect real production variability, including substitutions, true usage, and labor. Demos and show-and-tell sessions helped teams see the value early. The engagement also set a roadmap that ties operational reporting to executive decisions, so leaders can evaluate customer and product strategy with data instead of assumptions, and prepares the platform for future automation and AI.

Customer benefits

The company is moving from ERP as record keeping to ERP as a decision engine. Operational teams are increasingly bought in because they can see how their inputs turn into better inventory accuracy and performance visibility. Leaders have a clearer path to understanding which customers to grow, where margins are strongest, and where operational levers can lift underperforming products. At the portfolio level, the private equity owner gains stronger operational transparency, with earlier performance signals, fewer month-end surprises, and a system foundation that supports value creation across reporting, production planning, and growth.

“Volt brought a programmatic approach, real system expertise, and asked thoughtful questions to understand the business and marry that with process and product knowledge.”

Chief of Staff

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A Private Equity Portfolio Company Unlocks Operational Buy-In and Margin Visibility with Volt Technologies