Lipari Foods Chooses Cleo Integration Cloud™ to Deliver Products Quickly and Efficiently

Lipari Foods, a leading independent food distributor based in Warren, Michigan, has chosen Cleo Integration Cloud to provide the company with an integration platform that creates a centralized, flexible hub for electronic data processing.

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A Cleo customer since 2005, Lipari Foods serves more than 7,500 retailers in 16 states across the U.S. With a mission to transform customers’ stores by delighting shoppers with quality and selection, Lipari Foods works hard to serve as a valuable business partner. Retailers trust Lipari to execute marketing, merchandising, and in-store product publicity to enhance their reputations. Therefore, fostering relationships and improving communication with the growing number of partners and suppliers throughout its ecosystem are critical business needs.

Lipari Foods recognizes that as its business expansion through growth and acquisitions continues, maintaining the level of service customers have come to expect requires the company to steadily evolve its data integration capabilities. With increasing customer requests for additional protocols, for example, Lipari Foods realized a need to handle more than just EDI transactions.

Before implementing Cleo Integration Cloud, onboarding a new trading partner with a data requirement beyond EDI was difficult. Now, regardless of the protocol or format its partners and suppliers use (EDI, XML, spreadsheet, etc.), Lipari Foods can streamline electronic communications and onboard a partner in a matter of hours instead of days. This is good news, as the distributor plans to grow its number of trading partners significantly in the coming years. Specifically, Lipari Foods plans to jump from 150 partners to 1,000 — a process that will be simplified with the help of Cleo Integration Cloud.

"At the end of the day, we want to be easy to do business with. Cleo helps us accomplish that goal by allowing us to better communicate with our customers and partners. You can’t put a price on that,” said Michael Hegarty, director of ERP and CRM corporate strategy at Lipari Foods. “Cleo’s Managed Services team also makes it easy by managing the process for us – from installation to implementation to deployment and thorough daily system checks – so that we don’t have to expend our valuable in-house IT resources. We value the relationship they’ve built with us.”

Cleo President and CEO Mahesh Rajasekharan echoed those sentiments, saying, “Our customer-success objective with Lipari Foods is to ensure that Cleo Integration Cloud provides the company with the B2B-led integration strategy it needs to continually add value to its business relationships. By enabling Lipari Foods to continually enhance its supply chain capabilities, and to focus on food distribution service excellence, product quality, and freshness, this leading distributor can compete and thrive in the dynamic food service industry – and not worry about what’s happening with its data and integration technology.”

To learn more about how Cleo can benefit your business, visit the Cleo website.

About Lipari Foods, LLC

Lipari Foods was founded in 1963, the next step in the career of Jim Lipari, who began by delivering unique products from the back of his Buick station wagon. Today, Lipari Foods is a leading independent “perimeter of the store” distributor in the Midwest, delivering a wide range of quality bakery, dairy, deli, packaging, seafood, meat, specialty grocery, foodservice, confectionery and convenience food and beverage products to over 7,500 customers across 16 states.

About Cleo

Cleo is a global software company that delivers B2B-led cloud integration solutions focused on business outcomes, ensuring each customer’s potential is realized by delivering solutions that make it easy to discover and create value through the movement and integration of enterprise data. By providing the industry’s most complete and flexible B2B, application, embedded, and big data integration offerings, Cleo helps companies build trusted relationships across their business ecosystems today, while providing all the control and visibility they need to advance their business tomorrow. For more information, visit www.cleo.com or call +1.815.282.7695.