CASE STUDY: Second Harvest Community Food Bank and Hillshire Brands
Second Harvest Community Food Bank’s new Executive Director Chad Higdon and his dedicated staff wanted to improve their operational processes at the food bank. Higdon and his team took advantage of an opportunity offered to them by Hillshire Brands to work with experts during a one-day session to help them identify solutions to three operational challenges in finance, safety, and inventory management.
Tom Hayes, chief supply chain officer for Hillshire Brands, led a team of Hillshire professionals to help identify solutions for each of Second Harvest’s selected needs. Experts in each functional area led 90-minute sessions, working to understand the underlying challenge that the food bank faced. Second Harvest walked away from the session with three well-defined work plans that provided them with recommendations for a clear step forward in each of the three challenge areas.
“The diagnostic session was everything we could have asked for. It was very encouraging to see the teams from Hillshire as interested and invested in our organization as they were,” said Higdon.
Higdon realized that they needed to do a better job managing cash flow for their organization. The team had a second opportunity to turn to Hillshire Brands and its financial experts to help them create a financial model that allowed them to more effectively understand their cash position.
