Success Stories

In Canada's industrial heartland and beyond, the people who build and maintain fluid power equipment know they can count on DeeTag Ltd. to deliver "the right product, on time, every time."

To make good on that pledge, the London, ON-based distributor of hydraulic and pneumatic equipment, parts and supplies had turned to an Activant solution - Activant Acclaim - in 2002, in large part because of the specific functionality it had offered fluid power distributors. Within a few years' time, though, DeeTag was ready to tackle an equally important part of delivering on its pledge: Improving the efficiency of its warehouse operations. To do that, it turned to a more powerful solution - Activant Prophet 21 and its Wireless Warehouse Management Solution (WWMS) - in 2005.

An Offer They Couldn't Refuse

"We were just at the tip of the iceberg in terms of learning the software" with Acclaim, said DeeTag President Dean Gordon. "At the time, some fluid-power-specific features, like hose decoder, were not available in Prophet 21. We didn't think we were going to go in the direction of a Windows-based solution for our operations, but the sales representative made us an interesting proposition to make the switch. We saw all the good things that were being added to Prophet 21, and the sales and support team made it painless for us to convert."

They haven't regretted it for a minute. "In our first year, our sales rose 34 percent while our staff grew by only five percent," said Gordon.

Along with that jump in sales came a dramatic drop in merchandise returns - 32 percent in that same first year. Gordon attributes this to the capabilities and ease of use of the WWMS.

So Simple, The Boss' Kid Can Do It

"We hire students over the summer, and they can start pulling orders with WWMS right from the start," he said. "My son came in for one summer, and on his first day, he had a gun and was pulling orders. I went to investigate how well he was doing, and the warehouse staff confirmed his orders were error free."

As in the warehouse, so with the rest of DeeTag: "There is a fast learning curve for younger associates who come into the company knowing Windows," said Gordon. "They are diving into Prophet 21 and teaching you things after a couple of weeks."

Inter-warehouse transfers are also much easier, he added. "When one of our branches requested another branch's surplus stock, we had to do it as a vendor purchase by the receiving branch in Acclaim. Prophet 21 has auto-generation of surplus transfer from one branch to another - you just set it up and off you go."

When Everyone Gets It, Things Just Work Better

Gordon was pleased by how rapidly people got comfortable with using Prophet 21 compared with Acclaim. "In terms of training, it would have been more expensive to implement Acclaim across the company - our staff adapted to Prophet 21 much faster than they did to the green-screen solution, which is foreign to today's user."

While Gordon could not give a specific figure, he estimated that switching to Prophet 21 has saved DeeTag roughly $15,000 in training costs annually. And, he added, the company has experienced consistent, steady gains in efficiency across the board every year since going live.

And while Gordon cites better inventory control as the biggest benefit DeeTag has gotten from implementing Prophet 21, he also appreciates the features that are continually being added to make it even more useful for fluid power distributors. "The kitting and hose decoder features are very powerful. We've also adopted new signature capture technologies both at our sales counter and via PDAs that weren't available on Acclaim."

The bottom line for DeeTag is this: Prophet 21 gives the company more and better information faster, which in turn means they can serve more customers better and faster. "The ease of getting information to measure our stock and performance is something we've embraced - we've been able to pull a lot more information out of Prophet 21," Gordon said.

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