The Mama Lola’s Story
Mama Lola’s is a leading regional manufacturer of fresh, authentic tortillas, tortilla chips, and related products. Founded in 1987, the company produces corn and flour tortillas in a variety of flavors, shapes, colors and sizes. The Mama Lola’s focus on quality, freshness, on-time delivery, and product innovation makes the company a valued partner for customers ranging from restaurants to grocers, caterers, distributors, and school districts throughout Arizona.
In 2021, as the company experienced explosive growth, Chief Information Systems Analyst Devin Adams began managing a project to migrate off a legacy ERP platform. The push to modernize the application infrastructure also included migrating to Microsoft Office 365 in the cloud. Adams then collaborated with JourneyTEAM, a Gold-Certified Microsoft partner, to implement Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, a modern ERP platform.
“Both of these deployments were big steps in enabling us to automate many of our accounting and operational processes,” Adams says. “But key areas in which we wanted to make further improvements were invoicing, credit card payment processing, and collections. “This required eliminating manual steps that took up extra time for our customers and our accounting team.”
Manual Processes Delay Customer Payments
Previously, invoices were printed and handed off to customers as they received food products. Mama Lola’s then relied on customers to either mail checks or call in with credit card information.
When taking credit card information, the accounting team went through a manual process of obtaining authorization through the card payment service. They then had to rekey the information into QuickBooks, the accounting solution used before the deployment of Dynamics 365 Business Central.
“With this process, customers sometimes delayed calling in or claimed they could not get through,” Adams says. “The accounting team typically had to dedicate resources 24 hours each week to handle all the work in processing credit cards and chasing down late payments.”
A True Turnkey Solution
As Adams worked to complete the ERP implementation, JourneyTEAM recommended integrating Dynamics 365 Business Central with the iSolutions credit card payment and collections platform. When Adams researched iSolutions, he recognized it could provide the functionality Mama Lola’s needed, but he was skeptical, at first, that the platform was as a “turnkey” solution.
That’s because Mama Lola’s was already working with another solution provider that promised their solution was turnkey. Seven months later, Adams was still trying to iron out the bugs.
“iSolutions is different!” Adam quickly points out. “They deliver what they promise, and their solution truly is turnkey. All it took was 30 minutes of configuration work by iSolutions within Business Central and a couple of days of training by our staff, using helpful YouTube videos. We were operational in just one week.”
Reduced Drain on Accounting Resources
By integrating iSolutions with Business Central, Mama Lola’s has automated the process from invoices to credit card payments to collections. When orders are entered into Business Central, iSolutions automatically emails invoices to customers that contain a link to a credit card payment portal.
As a result, customers can now make payments without calling in, and payments are automatically routed for deposit to the Mama Lola’s bank account. For collections, Mama Lola’s has the ability to activate a function that automatically notifies customers and the accounting team when payments are overdue.
“We’ve reduced the 24 hours per week that the accounting team used to spend on payment processing down to 5 hours,” Adams says. “And with invoices going out at the time of the order rather than when shipments occur, that speeds up our cash flow by 2-3 days.”
ROI in 30 Days
Mama Lola’s achieved ROI within 30 days of deploying the iSolutions platform. “With the implementation and ongoing monthly costs, we receive great value in the way we improved collections,” Adams emphasizes. “During that first month, the revenue we collected increased by 25%.”
Another important benefit is that the iSolutions platform running in the cloud meets the rigorous compliance requirements of PCI DSS for credit card payments. Mama Lola’s doesn’t have to worry about the internal infrastructure complying because no credit card data is stored on company servers.
During the entire project, Adams was impressed with the iSolutions approach:
“iSolutions reached out constantly and proactively asked for feedback. And during that first go-live month, they were there to provide support when needed. Their payment processing and collection solution integrates so seamlessly with Dynamics 365 Business Central, it’s a must-have for anyone needing to make payments easy for their customers and their accounting teams.”
– Devin Adam, Chief Information Systems Analyst
