Tomchei Shabbos Food Bank of NJ is the largest kosher food pantry in NJ. They provide basic kosher food provisions for thousands of families suffering economic distress. Their work is done with the ultimate discretion and dignity. Tomchei Shabbos services include weekly food distributions, monthly distributions, major holiday drives and case management. Thousands and thousands of pounds of fresh groceries, poultry, basic pantry supplies are delivered directly to the recipients doors. During the busy holiday season, drive through mobile distribution sites are set up to enable recipients to pick up their larger than usual orders.
The Challenges
Outdated Platform
The organization faced challenges in efficiently managing their operations, distributions and case management, due to their outdated software. Their FoxPro database constantly crashed and could not handle simultaneous sessions.
Limited Reporting
Additionally, the schema was limited and could not give them historical insight as to how many recipients were in each campaign and drive year over year.
Operational Difficulties
The difficulties were exacerbated during the holiday season when the amount of recipients multiplied. It was difficult for them to maintain their inventory properly as well as make changes to delivery routes.
No Real Time
There was no real time insight into how the onsite distribution was working out. They had no idea how many recipients showed up at the drive. Was anybody missing items from their order? Did the recipients arrive during their scheduled time slot? It was impossible to track all the changes that happened throughout the drive without tedious data entry after the drive. The drives had limited network accessibility so any application had to rely on offline content which made the logistics very difficult.
Lack of Roles Based Access
On top of all of the operational difficulties, there were challenges with security. Tomchei Shabbos is vigilant that their recipients remain discreet and the database did not allow different levels of access.
Growing Demand
The post-Covid economic situation has unfortunately seen the increased need of Tomchei Shabbos services. Their recipient list has nearly doubled over the past 4 years and efficient services are needed more than ever before.
Bitbean’s Solution
To address these issues, Tomchei Shabbos of NJ sought the expertise of Bitbean. Bitbean began with a discovery which evaluated the process pain points, the requirements and the need to stay within budget. After a thorough understanding of the operations, Bitbean proposed a Salesforce solution utilizing Salesforce’s non-profit licensing tier.
Bitbean’s expertise in Salesforce implementations allowed them to achieve amazing results. This transformed their operations, enhanced efficiency, increased stability and most importantly was affordable.
The Salesforce Implementation
Bitbean began by creating a personalized App for Tomchei Shabbos which was designed to reflect the needs of the Tomchei Shabbos administration in a simplified experience. The app contained a dashboard with useful metrics and easy accessibility to all the main areas of functionality. This tailoring of the Salesforce platform improved the learning curve of the users as they were able to seamlessly adapt to the new platform.
We then assembled a solid UI/UX design team to build a user-friendly interface to dynamically display the generated results of minyan locations and times. Next, our expert engineering team would build a system with GPS functionality integrated with a rule- and time-based engine layered with real-time sunrise, midday, and sunsets. The key piece, however, was incorporating the ability to crowdsource information.
The immediate benefits
Better Visibility
Utilizing Salesforce Reports and Campaigns, Tomchei Shabbos was able to create weekly, monthly and holiday distributions by easily setting up campaigns to manage recipients for each of the distributions. Lightning pages and components were utilized to highlight key metrics on any important page. This gave them a much more granular view of constituents and were now able to track status and order requests per campaign.
Stability and Security
Being on the Salesforce platform gave them the stability and ability to grow painlessly. Additionally, Roles, access and sharing rules were setup to ensure that the information remained confidential even amongst office staff.
Holiday Distribution
The holiday distribution is much more complex. Tomchei Shabbos offers their constituents the ability to place orders, and request customized quantities of food. Additionally, each constituent is given a specific order pickup time. This ensure that the staff of volunteers is able to handle the influx at the distribution site and there is no bottleneck of traffic. At the mobile distribution site, the order needs to be retrieved and available should the network go offline. To accommodate all these needs Bitbean created another personalized experience to handle the order, scheduling and drive through process. Bitbean utilized third party document creation applications to allow the bulk print and email of orders to constituents. Additionally, Bitbean created an order scheduling system to ensure that no more than the allocated slots would be filled through-out the day. Bitbean setup real time flows, dashboards and alerts to monitor the scheduling process. Bitbean created responsive screens to allow for a scan-in check in process, along with Web API printing capabilities. Kiosks throughout the multi lane distribution site, allowed the food centers to have accessibility to the order information in real time. The orders appeared on the IPAD in the correct lanes in the order of the cars checked in, so that step by step Tomchei Shabbos could ensure that the orders were being filled properly. In case of network issues, Bitbean also created a system that would allow the order to printout upon check-in via an elegant printnode solution.
Data Driven Decision Making
Additionally, a quick checkout IPAD now gave Tomchei Shabbos metrics into how long it took to fulfill each order, whether they were staffed properly and whether the customers arrived at the correct pickup time or not. Bitbean's Salesforce implementation revolutionized Tomchei Shabbos of NJ's food distribution operations, empowering the organization to overcome challenges, improve efficiency, and become a role model for organizations throughout the sector. By leveraging the power of Salesforce, Tomchei Shabbos of NJ was able to streamline their processes, scale their operations, and make a greater impact on the communities they serve. The successful partnership between Tomchei Shabbos of NJ and Bitbean exemplifies the transformative potential of technology in the non-profit sector.