Meals on Wheels San Francisco Transforms Supply Chain Management to Serve Up to 30,000 Meals Each Day with OpenEdge-Powered ERP by MyOffice Apps

Meals on Wheels America has 5,000 independent programs across the United States, with the program in San Francisco being one of the largest in the nation. Founded in 1970, the San Francisco location delivers more than two million meals each year to thousands of homebound seniors through its daily Home-Delivered Meals program and volunteers deliver bags of groceries to 500 seniors every week as part of the Home-Delivered Groceries program, a collaboration between Meals on Wheels San Francisco and the SF- Marin Food Bank.

Meals on Wheels San Francisco will be set to deliver up to 30,000 meals each when the need comes, and according to City data, that need is not far away. As Richard Crocker, Food Safety and Compliance Manager at Meals on Wheels San Francisco, explained, “In 2020, we opened a new, $42 million state-of-the-art industrial kitchen and food distribution center with an eye on increasing our capacity, quality of foods, and variety of offerings in order to keep up with the growing population of food insecure seniors that live in San Francisco.”

In order to produce high-quality meals at this capacity, Meals on Wheels has designed large-scale food storage processes and systems that allows for more food products to be safely

refrigerated and stored for use. These food products are what the organization’s culinary team draws from in order to design healthy and delicious meals for clients. To reach this lofty goal, Meals on Wheels required an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that could:

• Provide accurate inventory information, accounting for substitutions in real-time
• Track food costs and expiration dates to minimize food loss
• Enable the flexibility to create new meal combinations
• Provide authorization capabilities
• Seamlessly integrate with the third-party food distributors

Some 4,000 older adults in San Francisco rely on Meals on Wheels daily for their nourishment needs, which is why the ERP systems’ assurance that nothing was falling through the cracks was critical.

Meals on Wheels turned to My Office Apps’ (MOA) fully integrated, cloud-based ERP called Kechie. Its powerful, easy-to-use software features a straightforward user interface and robust pre-built reporting capabilities helps new users get up and running quickly. For nearly 30 years, MOA’s founder Mehrdad Komeili has been using the Progress® OpenEdge® integrated development environment to build its high-performance and reliable applications. Mehrdad Komeili initially started using OpenEdge 6 as an end-user and is now using on OpenEdge 12 to take advantage of the latest features to build Kechie by MOA.

As Frank Scott, Director of Fleet and Facilities, Meals on Wheels San Francisco, explained, “The Kechie software solution will allow us to monitor our end-to-end supply chain management 

from procurement, inventory and tracking to the end destination, which is into the refrigerators of our meals recipients.” Kechie was implemented throughout the organization from the kitchen to the inventory rooms, to the meal deliveries themselves.

Given that implementing an ERP is significantly different in a kitchen than in a manufacturing setting, Kechie underwent several changes for this unique use case. Not only was the ERP adapted to address inventory accuracy and substitutions, but also the production of trays ready to be delivered. The MOA team also integrated with third-party food distributors, including US Foods, Gordon Foods, and Second Harvest, to improve efficiency and accuracy for their clients.

Through the partnership with MOA and Progress, Meals on Wheels has been able to onboard more users, going from 5 to 17 in the San Francisco chapter. This helps Meals on Wheels San Francisco reach its goal of delivering 30,000 meals in a single day and has transformed the way they delivery to their clients.

As Crocker continued, “Now, almost a year in to implementing the Kechie Management System, we’re able to better manage our warehouse inventory and internal distribution in a way that was not possible before. My Office Apps helps us streamline our processes. Receiving personnel can now look up expected deliveries and plan for them and distribution of products is now tracked from beginning to end. Because we’re able to get this information immediately, we can scale these recipes correctly to ensure quality and flavor are retained. Knowing exactly what we have on hand and where it is at any given moment is a huge time saver for our staff. Overall, we can now adapt to capacity demands that may fluctuate by thousands of meals daily and know with confidence that the people who count on us each day will not go hungry or be disappointed by their meal.”

Mehrdad Komeili, the founder of MOA, started the company to provide small and medium-sized businesses with an ERP system that is both scalable and affordable. Since founding the company in 2014, Mehrdad Komeili and the team at MOA have dedicated themselves to consulting with nonprofits to improve their overall operations and give back what they can to make the world a better place. The technology provided by OpenEdge helps his company deliver on this promise to organizations like Meals on Wheels and other non-profits.