Webinars
The webinars offered by BFC Software focus on optimizing food distribution operations by demonstrating how integrated fleet management—from route planning to driver pay—and warehouse best practices—such as inventory control and truck building—can enhance efficiency, accuracy, and collaboration while reducing manual work and protecting margins.
Join a live or on-demand BFC webinar and learn how food distributors optimize buying, warehouse, and transportation operations.
The Importance of Integration in Fleet Management
BFC Software and Descartes presents 'From Route to Driver Pay: How Integrated Planning Improves Fleet Performance'
Distributors and private fleets often rely on disconnected tools for route design, driver bids, daily routing, load planning, and driver pay. The result? Manual workarounds, limited visibility, inconsistent decisions, and underutilized assets—making it harder to run a predictable, efficient operation.
Topics Covered:
- Strategic Route Planning Explained
- Incorporating Driver Needs into Routing
- Daily Route Planning and Execution
- Optimizing Load Planning for Efficiency
- Workflow Overview for Load Planner
- Selection Tool Integration
- Understanding Loading Constraints
- Interdepartmental Collaboration
- Role of Information in Routing
- Overview of BFC's Capabilities
- Integration of Routing and Load Planning
Warehouse Best Practices for Food Distributors: Driving Warehouse Productivity While Protecting Margin
Food distribution warehouses face constant pressure to move faster while maintaining accuracy across lots, dates, and inventory locations. Many teams still rely on manual work, disconnected systems, or tribal knowledge to keep operations running, which makes consistency and scale difficult. In this webinar we cover practical warehouse best practices built specifically for food distributors.
Topics Covered:
- Overview of Best Practices in Food Distribution
- BFC's Unique Approach to Food Operations
- Best Practices in Receiving and Put Away
- Inventory Control Strategies
- Truck Building and Selection Process
- Delivery and Returns Management
- Conclusion and Key Takeaways
- Q&A Session
- Importance of Closed Loop Reporting
- Understanding Food Distribution Expertise
- Common Best Practices in the Industry
- Identifying Early Signs of Inventory Issues
- Negative Slot Counts as Warning Signs
Forecast Daily, Replenish Smarter: How to Improve Service Levels, Reduce Spoilage, and Increase Profitability
Replenishment is one of the biggest drivers of service levels, spoilage, and margin in food distribution. When forecasts miss, the result is waste, stockouts, and impact to margin. In this webinar, we’ll show how distributors are using BFC Replenishment Optimizer (RO) to improve forecast accuracy and ordering for food-specific challenges like short shelf life, volatile demand, and complex buying patterns. You’ll see how RO works in practice, what results teams are seeing, and what it takes to rollout and sustain a smarter replenishment process.
Topics Covered:
- Introduction to the Webinar
- Overview of Replenishment Optimizer
- Current Practices in Inventory Management
- Challenges of Weekly Forecasting
- Understanding Perishable Inventory
- Age-Based Replenishment Strategies
- Impact of Spoilage on Profitability
- Balancing Service Levels and Inventory Costs
- Daily Demand Forecasting Techniques
- Customer Success Stories
- Recap and Key Takeaways
- Q&A Session
- Understanding Lead Time and Variability
- Addressing Short Shelf Life and Supplier Variability
- Forecasting Demand Volatility
- Managing Customer Demand Shifts
- Invitation for Further Engagement
AI in Food Distribution: What's Here, What's Coming, and What BFC Is Building
AI is moving quickly and we all need to keep up. In this webinar, BFC CEO Will Collins breaks down what AI can really do for distributors today, where the technology is headed, and the foundational data and processes needed to make it work. You’ll leave with a clear view of what’s possible now, what’s coming next, and how to prepare your teams for the next generation of tools.
Topics Covered:
- Introduction and Welcome
- Setting the Stage for AI in Food Service
- Understanding AI: Basics and Categories
- The Current Landscape of AI Technology
- Exploring Agentic AI Concepts
- AI Project Success Rates and Trends
- AI Applications in Various Industries
- Identifying Successful AI Projects
- Real-World Examples of AI Success
- AI Innovations in Food Service
- Investments in AI Development
- Innovations in Truck Building and Load Planning
- Exploring AI Applications in Inventory Management
- Data Management Strategies for AI Implementation
- The Role of Human Oversight in AI
- Call to Action for Collaboration and Innovation
Related
Forecast Daily, Replenish Smarter: How to Improve Service Levels, Reduce Spoilage, and Increase Profitability
The webinar titled "Forecast Daily, Replenish Smarter" demonstrates how food distributors can enhance service levels, reduce spoilage, and boost profitability by using BFC Replenishment Optimizer to improve daily forecast accuracy and streamline replenishment processes, overcoming challenges like short shelf life and volatile demand that traditional ERP and spreadsheet methods struggle with.
Beverage
BFC Software offers intelligent tools for beverage distributors and retailers to optimize inventory forecasting, streamline replenishment, and enhance driver bidding across multiple warehouses, helping clients like City Line, Cotati Food Service, and Jordano's FoodService improve operational efficiency, reduce labor needs, and increase profitability.
How to Measure Buying Team Performance in Food Distribution
The article explains that food distributors can improve buying team performance and protect profit margins by systematically tracking service, waste, and profitability metrics, increasing transparency with predictive tools like BFC Replenishment Optimizer to manage future sellable inventory and expiration dates, and shifting from reactive to proactive buying decisions.
BFC Software: Food Operations Platform for Distributors
BFC Software offers a comprehensive, AI-ready food operations platform for distributors that leverages advanced analytics to optimize inventory, product movement, workforce utilization, and compliance, resulting in 5%-30% increased fill rates and significantly reduced error rates, with modular solutions spanning buying, warehouse, outbound, and transportation operations to enhance real-time visibility, traceability, and decision-making.
What a WMS Actually Does in Food Distribution (And Why Your ERP Can't Do It)
A Warehouse Management System (WMS) in food distribution is specialized software that optimizes and orchestrates every warehouse task—such as receiving, storage, picking, and loading—while managing perishability, temperature control, traceability, and regulatory compliance at a granular level that generic ERP systems cannot, thereby enhancing efficiency, accuracy, and scalability in food distribution operations.
Foodservice
The foodservice software platform offers comprehensive, tech-driven solutions—including inventory optimization, end-to-end traceability via a specialized warehouse management system, streamlined driver bidding, and delivery efficiency tools—to help distributors manage perishables, ensure timely deliveries, maintain regulatory compliance, and improve profitability through data-driven insights, phased low-risk implementation, and continuous 24/7 support.