Success Stories

Activant Prophet 21 Helps Georgia-based Distributor Streamline Pricing and Inventory Management Processes

Eric Harris, branch manager of the Duluth, GA location of Manufactured Duct and Supply, used to spend most evenings processing invoices and finishing other job-related paperwork. "It was terrible," he remembers. "I would go home, eat dinner, and go right back to work."

Activant Prophet 21, a Windows-based, SQL Server solution designed for distributors, drastically reduced the time Harris spends on paperwork. "Prophet 21 easily cuts the time I spend processing invoices in half," Harris says. "I haven't had to finish paperwork in my living room since we went live."

Firm Believers

Roger Torri founded the Doraville, GA-based Manufactured Duct in the mid-1990s with partner Kenny Simpson. "We worked for another distributor and knew we could do things better ourselves," Simpson recalls. "So, we started our own company."

The company flourished. Five years, two locations, and millions of dollars in revenue later, Torri and Simpson realized that they had outgrown their outdated start-up system. "It worked great for the money we paid for it but it was behind the times," Simpson says. "It was just plain old. It didn't do what we needed it to do."

Torri and Simpson believed in technology and knew that moving to a new solution could help them increase sales, improve customer service, and reduce operating costs. After investigating several enterprise software solutions, they found Prophet 21. "The functionality is excellent," says Torri. "It has everything we need to service customers efficiently and manage inventory effectively."

Good Prices

Manufactured Duct services hundreds of customers throughout the Southeast and buys goods from many different vendors. Before moving to Prophet 21, managing customer and supplier pricing was a time-consuming, labor-intensive task. "Manually changing prices on 10,000 line items is not a fun job," Torri says.

Prophet 21 simplifies processes because it enables distributors to update vendor prices and enter new items into their databases electronically. And, because it enables distributors to easily set job-based, customer-specific, and special prices with a few keystrokes, customer pricing processes are also streamlined. "Prophet 21 helps us get in there, get the job done, and get out," Torri says, estimating that automated pricing processes save administrative staff at least two days each month. "It helps us save time and money and takes the burden off our staff."

And, because Prophet 21 offers key personnel access to cost and pricing information, they can react quickly to customer demands and competitive pressures. "Prophet 21 lets us bring up an item's cost so we can stay competitive and still make a good profit," Harris says. "Before, I'd have to call the main office and ask someone to look through a file to get me that information."

Managing Inventory

Good inventory management is crucial to any distributor's success, and purchasing processes are key to ensuring the right stock moves into -- and out of -- a warehouse. Because Prophet 21 helps Manufactured Duct employees monitor inventory more carefully, the company reduced dead and slow-moving inventory by more than $20,000.

Harris also says that Prophet 21 greatly simplified purchasing processes and has reduced the amount of time he spends on daily tasks by 25 percent. "You can see exactly what your history is, what you have on hand, and what's allocated," he says. "It takes the guesswork out of purchasing processes."

Overall, Simpson concludes, Prophet 21 helps Manufactured Duct employees carry out the company's mission. "We're focused on customer service and on getting things out to the customers when they need them," Simpson says. "We depend on Prophet 21 to help us do that -- and it does."

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