Grocery wholesalers and cash-and-carry distributors are under pressure to do more at once. Restaurant and retail customers expect accurate stock levels online, buyers want faster pricing decisions, and leadership teams are asking what AI can do for the back office. For many operators, the biggest obstacle to all three is the same: product and inventory data they can't fully trust.
MVR Cash & Carry, a wholesale distributor serving restaurants, foodservice operators, retailers and independent businesses, offers a practical example of how one company worked through that problem and what it unlocked.
When one product lives three lives
Wholesale grocery has a unit-of-measure problem that rarely makes headlines. A single item might be sold as a 32-bottle case, a 10-bottle case and as individual bottles. Each format has its own price, barcode and shelf location, but all of them draw from the same inventory.
At MVR, the legacy environment combined Store Management Suite for store operations, separate QuickBooks and Sage accounting, and a Microsoft Access database for reporting. Over time, the relationships between pack sizes could become disconnected, and inventory counts drifted. "We couldn't trust the data," said Mike DeMarco, Project Lead for Manufacturing Logistics at MVR.
That gap had ripple effects. Without reliable inventory numbers, eCommerce expansion stalled, warehouse teams couldn't fully adopt handheld scanning, and leadership pulled reports from several systems with no single view of performance. Forecasting relied on spreadsheets. "It was almost non-existent," DeMarco said.
For a company whose main differentiator is customer service, that was a real constraint. Customers notice when an item shows as available and isn't, or when shelf and register prices don't match.
Choosing a platform built around the item
MVR evaluated Oracle NetSuite, SAP, Sage X3 and Infor before selecting LS Central from LS Retail. LS Central is a single solution with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central embedded as its core, so retail, merchandising and point of sale run in the same system as financials, purchasing and inventory. The owners' familiarity with Microsoft tools played a role in the decision.
"We weren't just replacing software," said Mark Persaud, Senior Solution Architect at ArcherPoint by Cherry Bekaert, which led the implementation. The goal was a single operating model where purchasing, warehouse, merchandising and finance all work from the same item record.
The project brought together several layers:
- LS Central for merchandising, promotions, point of sale, financials and inventory in one system
- Insight Works for mobile receiving, inventory movement and warehouse execution
- Extensions for advanced pricing, vendor rebate management, automated label creation and scale integration that keeps shelf and scale pricing in sync
Pricing and rebates deserve a closer look. In wholesale grocery, vendor rebates and tiered pricing often live in spreadsheets and get reconciled after the fact. Moving them into the ERP makes margin visible when decisions are made, not weeks later.
From reports to decisions
With operational data in one place, MVR added Microsoft Fabric and Power BI. Data is consolidated, refined into trusted datasets and surfaced in dashboards for purchasing, inventory, pricing, merchandising, forecasting and overall performance. Forecasting has moved from ad hoc spreadsheets to a repeatable process.
Next up: AI agents for routine work
MVR approached modernization in phases. Phase one established the core platform. Phase two focuses on automation. "Phase two is we want to automate and simplify as much as we possibly can," DeMarco said.
The first target is invoice handling, work that currently falls to a team of office assistants. It's a fitting place to start, because AI agents depend on the same foundation as eCommerce and forecasting: clean, connected data.
Takeaways for grocery wholesalers
- Fix item and unit-of-measure relationships first. eCommerce, scanning and AI all inherit data quality problems.
- Bring pricing and rebates into the system of record so margin is visible in real time.
- Plan in phases. A stable core platform makes later automation projects faster and lower risk.
