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Success Stories |
Creekstone Farms live on OpenAccounts in record time
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DENVER, Jan. 9, 2003— The Denver bankruptcy court trustee overseeing the liquidation
of the former Future Beef Operations plant and assets in Arkansas City, Kan. has accepted an offer
from Creekstone Farms Premium Beef LLC to purchase the high-profile beef processing plant.
The offer is subject to court approval on Jan. 10.
Future Beef Operations was placed into Chapter 7 bankruptcy proceedings in August 2002
and was auctioned on Jan. 8 in Denver.
The company will use the facility to process its fresh and cooked Black Angus beef products. Creekstone Farms Premium Beef LLC is a privately held producer and marketer of Creekstone Farms Premium Black Angus BeefTM based near Louisville, KY. The $100-million, 400,000-plus-square-foot processing plant incorporates many highly innovative technologies for harvesting, processing and cooking beef. Ownership of such a state-of-the-art processing facility is a major step toward vertical integration for the Creekstone Farms Black Angus branded beef program, which was founded seven years ago by John and Carol Stewart on their 1,100-acre purebred Black Angus farm near Louisville. The Stewarts' overall business model has been to develop their own unique, high-quality Black Angus genetics with the intent of becoming the world's premier producer and marketer of Black Angus beef. Creekstone Farms had been processing its beef at the former Future Beef Operations plant -- named "Plant of the Year" by Food Engineering magazine -- in the months prior to Future Beef's Chapter 7 filing and subsequent closing in August 2002. |
Once this acquisition was complete, Creekstone set out on the ambitious task of reviving a plant that had been shut down since August of 2002 and having it ready to open by March 2003. Other than the obvious tasks of reworking the plant infrastructure, hiring and/or rehiring personnel and getting suppliers and vendors lined up, all of the required software had to be selected, acquired, and implemented. Normally, that process alone takes months or more. Anticipating that type of delay, and because Creekstone determined that the prior software packages were not acceptable to revive, they implemented a temporary accounting solution that was a combination of off-the-shelf packages and Microsoft Excel.
Enter ACUMEN Corporation and OpenAccounts financial software. The software was selected to handle the General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Project Costing, and Financial Reporting needs of Creekstone, and to integrate with the other operation systems as they are installed and brought on-line. ACUMEN was chosen to complete the implementation. As of March 13, Creekstone is officially live on GL, AP and Project Costing.
With a direct, hands-on approach to the implementation, ACUMEN was able to work with the team from Creekstone to set up the software, convert the transactions and balances from their existing sources, implement a custom PO interface and train the accounting and support staffs in record time.
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