Your One Stop Partner for Packaging, Distribution & Supply Solutions – ACR
Your Trusted Source for Foodservice Essentials
ACR (AmerCareRoyal) is a single stream resource for essential packaging and preparation products used in the foodservice, janitorial, sanitation, education, industrial, hospitality, and healthcare industries. With multiple shipping points across North America, their family of brands service national level customers with outstanding customer service and an ever-growing product line. As a leading supplier of non-food products to the restaurant industry, the client relied heavily on its IT organization to support evolving business needs, including order management, procurement, and customer-facing tools. However, delivery durations, shifting priorities, and IT resource constraints were impacting the company’s ability to respond to market demands.
In response to these challenges within a private equity–backed environment, Thai Vong, CIO, introduced a more adaptive, transparent, and outcome-focused approach — partnering with Agile Brains Consulting to drive Agile adoption, enhance work and resource management, and improve value delivery across the organization.
The Challenges in Delivery
As part of the Agile transformation engagement, our consulting team of Enterprise and Program Agile coaches conducted an initial current state organizational assessment that included stakeholder interviews across business and IT functions. Three primary challenges were consistently identified:
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Unclear Requirements and Shifting Scope: Interviewees cited frequent changes to project scope and inconsistent quality of requirements documentation. This contributed to rework, delays, and reduced stakeholder confidence in delivery timelines.
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Lack of Accountability and Engagement: Project execution suffered from unclear ownership, with business and IT teams disengaging once planning was complete. This led to a lack of follow-through on priorities and misalignment between expectations and outcomes.
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Absence of Agile Roles: The organization lacked clearly defined Agile roles such as Product Owner, Scrum Master, and dedicated cross-functional team members. Without role clarity, teams struggled with ownership, prioritization, and consistent execution of Agile practices.
These challenges resulted in delays, reduced visibility into project status, and difficulty delivering incremental value. ACR recognized that a new delivery model grounded in Agile principles and value-delivery was needed to address these systemic issues and create a culture of predictability and quality within ACR.
Growing Agile Excellence and Effective Work Management
Following the assessment, our consulting team partnered with ACR to foster a foundation for long-term Agile maturity and enhanced execution discipline. This effort focused on two complementary pillars: building Agile excellence and establishing effective work management practices.
Agile Excellence: Training, Roles, and Culture:
To support meaningful transformation, we identified and cultivated a group of internal change agents — individuals across IT and business functions who demonstrated interest in adopting new ways of working. These champions received focused training on key Agile concepts, including:
• Agile mindset, value delivery and requirements gathering techniques
• The Scrum values, delivery framework and respective ceremonies
• Roles and responsibilities across Product Owners, Scrum Masters, and team members
Effective Work Management:
Tools, Visibility, and Prioritization
To reinforce Agile delivery and improve transparency, we designed and implemented a model project in Azure DevOps (ADO). This included:
• A standardized ADO project template to support future Agile initiatives
• A well-designed Kanban board tailored for Agile workflow visualization & clearly defined backlogs, work item types, and process states
• Embedded collaboration with business stakeholders to refine user stories, improve requirement quality, and align both expected outcomes and prioritization to business value
Built-In quality:
The rate of found defects dropped over the course of three sprints, indicating better quality, stronger alignment between requirements & delivered functionality, and improved communication between development and quality assurance engineers.
