Ignite Conversations: Beaver Street Fisheries

Product information management is more than a single task. Rather, it’s a continual process of improvement. For seafood importer and distributor Beaver Street Fisheries, it’s been a journey more than a decade in the making.

Beaver Street manages around $150 million in inventory at any given time across their Jacksonville, FL headquarters and satellite warehouses. And every piece of that inventory needs to have complete and accurate information for their customers, or it’s seen as a failure in data delivery for their clients.

Ray Poinsette, the Six Sigma black belt who leads many of Beaver Street’s data quality initiatives, is a strong believer in the combination of people, processes, and technology – in that order. Once he found the “hungry data folks” who were interested and motivated to learn, only then could they move to building the technical capabilities that would help drive the business forward.

And it has: According to Ray, since building their team in this way, they have been able to highlight the areas of the business that leadership should invest in to grow the company.

It goes without saying that Beaver Street takes data quality seriously, and they see it as the prime way to satisfy their customers – not just a nice-to-have, according to Poinsette. This is why his team looks at their roles as being “data guardians” who help to see that the proper information is moving where it needs to be, across more than eCommerce. Departments including warehouse or buying groups, in addition to the digital shelf can all benefit from a complete set of product information.

If we’re selling 100 products to a trading partner, or one product to a trading partner…If they get that one product and it doesn’t have everything… to them, that’s a 100% fail. — Ray Poinsette, Director of Process improvement

See what else Ray Poinsette had to say about Beaver Street Fisheries’ best-in-class approach to data management, how their relentless focus on content completeness has helped to grow the business, and the changes in how they’ve approached their content across Foodservice and Retail since the beginning of the pandemic.