Success Stories

What’s the most productive thing the employees in your company could be doing right now? Stocking the warehouse? Delivering orders? Sending out invoices? Maybe. But the truth is, there’s probably no better measure of productivity than sales per employee.

If you want proof, just ask Bob Zamarripa, president and CEO of OneSource Distributors, where, with the help of Activant Eclipse™, sales per employee have grown by 30 percent. “The solution is just dynamite at helping you streamline your processes and get your costs under control,” he says. “It’s allowed us to grow our business without increasing the size of our support and back-offi ce staff.”

More Than Just Talk

Headquartered in Oceanside, CA, OneSource was founded in the fall of 1983 as a single-location supplier of electrical and electronic industrial automation products. With Allen-Bradley as their main control product line, OneSource is recognized as one of Southern California’s premier sources for quality electrical products and customer service.

Today, OneSource includes three regional sales divisions - in San Diego, Orange County, and greater Los Angeles - and ten counter-sales locations, all working together to generate $165 million in annual revenues.

OneSource made the switch to Eclipse in 1999. At that time, as part of the search for a new software provider, Zamarripa visited users running four of the best-known solutions. “As far as I was concerned, Eclipse was the winner,” he recalls. “When you talk about distribution software, you typically hear all about what the solution doesn’t do, but when we talked to Eclipse users, everyone wanted to tell us how much they liked what it did.”

Of course Zamarripa didn’t just talk to Eclipse users - he talked to people who worked for Activant, too. “Activant had the brightest, most knowledgeable people of everyone we met, so we decided to go with the people who really knew what they were doing,” he says.

Zamarripa was also impressed with what he saw in Eclipse demos. “While everyone else was talking about having value-added features, it soon became clear that it was just talk,” he recalls. “But with Eclipse, all the advanced technology was actually there for us to see.”

Cutting Phone Calls And Administrative Tasks

Since making the move to Activant Eclipse, OneSource has pursued an aggressive growth strategy - with just under 30 percent of the company’s growth coming from acquisitions. Between 2001 and 2005, the company went from having nine branches to 13, increasing revenues by 57 percent, while adding just 50 employees - most of them in sales. “Because Eclipse lets us run a centralized business model, we can stay focused on adding just those who contribute directly to the bottom line,” Zamarripa explains OneSource’s IT Director Bob Taylor credits Eclipse with providing the technology necessary to improve productivity and fuel growth. He estimates that with Eclipse’s ecommerce tools, OneSource has reduced the number of phone calls and administrative tasks it handles by as much as 90 percent. “We process orders far more productively and profitably - especially since we get between 20,000 and 25,000 e-commerce orders each year.”

“We actually get a lot of compliments on our Web capabilities and customer interface,” adds Zamarripa. “And with Eclipse’s ability to manage logistics, we’re beating our competitors in deliveries - even when they’re the local guys and we’re 170 miles away.” Taylor agrees: “Being able to optimize our deliveries has played a big part in allowing us to grow and take advantage of acquisition opportunities when they presented themselves.”

Improving The Process

In 2003 OneSource earned its ISO 9001 certification and adopted Six Sigma Lean methodology in running its business. “It was a very big year for us,” recalls Zamarripa. “And it really accelerated our push to take advantage of all that Eclipse has to offer.”

For example, it was then that OneSource began to fully exploit the solution’s unquality event tracking (UET) tools and capabilities, which alerts users when an unacceptable action is performed, and then identifi es and records the event for analysis and correction. “We’re the king of UET,” says Zamarripa. “We probably have as many as 12 UET measurements that show us where processes aren’t working as they should.

“If an inside sales rep is working the counter and fi nds that he can’t fi ll an order for lack of inventory, the solution automatically sends a message straight to purchasing,” he adds. “At the same time, it goes into a queue that lets us examine all of these issues at the end of the month.”

Zamarripa goes on to explain how the solution has helped OneSource improve inventory accuracy. “We’ve created measurement tools that let us track every aspect of every order and know which employees were involved and when. If there’s ever a problem, we can see what happened and fi gure out why,” he says. “Even though we have over 20,000 unique items in stock, our inventory accuracy tops out at over 99 percent, so we almost never need to worry about our counts being wrong.”

Creating The Ideal Business

Having access to sophisticated technology is one thing. But knowing how to make the most of it can be quite another, that’s why both Zamarripa and Taylor are big fans of the Activant’s training programs.

OneSource employees have participated in everything from online training programs and Activant Educational Services classes, to customized on-site education.

“We’ve taken advantage of every kind of training Activant provides - to help us use the technology to create the kind of business we want to have,” says Zamarripa. “Our entire team is really committed to this technology. It’s what gives us a competitive advantage and keeps us from being just like everyone else.”

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