On the surface of it, you might think
that being a fresh fish market is a pretty simple business:
you buy fish; you sell fish.
But if you are Cousins Fish Market,
specializing in put fresh fish on the table for wholesale
and retail customers from Lake Placid to the Catskills,
from Binghampton and Syracuse to New York’s Capital Region,
the enterprise is more like a combination of being a
merchant, a day trader and an overnight package delivery
service.
But every day, Cousins Fish Market
rises to the challenge with the help of a great team
of nearly 60 people and the EXEControl system from Ebeling
Associates.
Throughout
each day and night, orders for fresh fish and other seafood
pour into Cousins Fish Market from restaurants, hospitals,
schools, and supermarkets. Calls come into the office,
are left on the answering machine or arrive by fax. The
orders specify what kind of fish the customer wants and
what quantity.
The office crew at Cousins enters each
order into the EXEControl system which generates tags
that contain the customer’s name, what they’ve ordered,
the number of pounds and what geographic delivery run
they are on.
Each day at noon, a tractor-trailer
leaves Cousins in Albany for Boston. The truck picks
up fresh seafood there and returns by Cousins between
nine and ten at night. When the truck arrives, the team
kicks into high gear, unloading the truck and “putting
up” the orders.
Behind the scenes, Cousins managers
have to update their costs because fish prices are volatile,
changing every day. Joyce Desantis, Secretary of Cousins
Fish Market, says, “We get a worksheet on EXEControl
that allows us to manually adjust the pricing. Supermarkets
might be one price, but we also have bear in mind that
many of our smaller customers might not be able to fully
absorb a huge increase in a particular fish. Discretion
and judgment are involved.”
She says, “When it comes to putting
the orders together, we have specialists: one guy does
haddock; another guy does lobster, and so forth. When
the haddock guy is finished, he sends down a sheet with
the weights on it, and the EXEControl system produces
the invoices. Tags are attached to the orders (including
special, state-required “clam tags” generated by EXEControl),
and everything goes to the loading dock.”
“What sets us apart,” she says, “is
that every piece of fish we sell is eyeballed, touched,
sized, packaged, and prepared for the customer. We return
fish that are not right. As a result, sometimes they
call us ‘rent a fish’ in Boston.”
The
orders are sorted and loaded into a fleet of trucks. “The
order of delivery changes every day,” Desantis says. “We
have to consider how busy we are, which establishments
opens and what time, and road miles.”
The drivers are given a “Driver’s Sheet” and
an invoice for each delivery they are going to make.
Some 320 invoices are generated each day by EXEControl.
When they drivers return, every bill is accounted for:
checked in as charged, cash on the bill, or cash on account.
Desantis says, “I run a list that tells
me everyone who hasn’t checked in. If you don’t check
in, there better be a really good reason.”
EXEControl, which replaced a previous
system, also handles invoices and generates checks for
some 50 active vendors who supply Cousins Fish Market. “I
like this system a lot,” Desantis says, “it’s easy to
use and it is easy to train people to use it. Aside from
our people, it is the heart of our business.”
At about 10 o’clock in the morning,
the loading dock is clean and the cooler is empty. But
then at noon, the truck leaves for Boston, and it starts
all over again.
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