Client Stories
Vallarta Supermarkets
Vallarta Supermarkets
A productivity lift of 40%: Vallarta Grocery leans into streamlined financial operations
The Challenge
Founded in 1985, the growth of Vallarta — a supermarket chain focused on Latino communities — has been exceptional. With 56 stores and more than 8,000 employees, Vallarta has demonstrated what a great growth trajectory a quality retail company can attain, when they know the market and give the customer the experience-products that they crave. Beloved by the Latin market in Southern California, the Vallarta chain has grown from 1 store in 1985 to 56 today.
However, with growth often comes growing pains, and Vallarta found itself restrained by legacy financial systems, restrictive infrastructure, and cumbersome, time-consuming financial processes as it consolidated new businesses into its enterprise, to scale.
With outdated systems on the backend, Vallarta was unable to easily integrate data from stores. The accounting system had an outmoded multi-chart of accounts structure, so too much time was spent compiling and consolidating the numbers and not enough could be spent analyzing-improving the business. Each legal entity processed individual vendor checks to the same vendors, increasing bank fees and vendor reconciliation time. Finally, end chain, forward-looking efficiencies like financial planning and analysis, and KPI tooling from a data lake, were not available.
The Solution
Vallarta needed a business partner with a proven methodology, who had successfully implemented Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance in the mid-market grocery sector, multiple times. Referred from a successful earlier Dynamics AX2012 project for Vallarta’s sister company, this 19-store Vallarta group turned again to the same team and technology that delivered the previous win. Argano — a two-time Microsoft Partner of the Year winner — recommended Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance as the foundation for the solution, augmented by integrations and automation built with Power Platform.
Argano brought business consultants to the table, who come from retail industry backgrounds, with strong real-life solutions that work for retail. In addition to deploying, tailoring, and optimizing the platform, Argano ensured a strategic implementation through its retail business consultants (who worked hand-in-hand with Vallarta’s team), and cohesive, consistent adoption of the solution through its business process modeling. Vallarta was ready to streamline financial operations.
The Results
With Dynamics 365 Finance implemented, Vallarta eliminated the replication of accounts across multiple entities and benefits from standardized structures across its legal entities, which enabled straightforward results comparison between operating units. Consolidation and reporting by 7 legal entities are now easy, with excellent financial reporting outputs. Individual analysis is also enabled to find anomalies at stores-companies that are swinging chain results. Finally, vendor payments were consolidated across entities, saving bank processing fees and time processing-tracking multiple payments to the same vendor.
The results were exceptional, with time-savings of 30-40% for reporting (no more chasing around missing accounts across multiple entities), vendor payment processing, and a concurrent increase in data accuracy. Leveraging Power Platform, data for multiple integrations from store systems is also now more reliably available for the company’s leadership team. System architecture has been modernized, enabling wider future options.
Additionally, due to the experience of Argano’s business strategists and its implementation team — and the laser-like focus of team counterparts within Vallarta — the entire project went live in less than six months and close to budget. Next up, Vallarta will turn to Argano and Dynamics to help in further aspects of its business, including asset management and store construction. The future looks fresh!
