Success Stories

Whisper Down the Lane, a game popular among children, uses collective misinterpretation as its comic foil. For those involved, it's a marvel that a simple phrase like, "My dog is named Gary," could transform, after being passed from ear to ear, emerge at the end of the line as, "Midge stole Nate's gravy."

Despite all of its playful hilarity, Whisper Down the Lane carries a stern warning about how a series of cumulative errors can quickly corrupt an otherwise clear message. It's an idea with applications reaching into the world of business, where the consequences are not laughs, but dollars and cents.

While technology has generally improved communication, there are still moments when confusion arises, and for Above Board Electronics (ABE), a distributor of electronic fasteners and components, a single miscommunication is one too many.

"The number of line items per transaction can be very high, so accurately transferring information to several different hands is a big challenge," explains Dantes Rosete, ABE's IT manager. "When a customer orders a part, it goes to a salesperson, then to a customer-service representative to be entered, and then to the supplier, so each point is a critical area where an error can be crippling."

Needing an answer that would eliminate miscommunication and data-entry errors, Rosete and the team at ABE turned to Trading Partner Connect, Activant's Internet trading network for distributors and manufacturers. "The nomenclature for our parts is much more complicated than UPC codes, so having Trading Partner Connect as a means of standardizing communication is indispensable," Rosete says.

Moving Data

Trading Partner Connect's ability to seamlessly exchange EDI documents with manufacturers enables ABE to reduce clerical and data-entry errors, which, according to Rosete, is a key to improved operations. "Information is managed electronically, so we're able to reduce the chances of an error occurring during a transaction," says Rosete. "If something does happen, we'll know where and what caused it, so a lot of the backtracking and grey areas are eliminated as well."

A full line of EDI transactions has simplified how ABE acquires product, especially from 3M, one of their largest suppliers. "We use Trading Partner Connect to view their stock levels and place purchase orders accordingly," explains Jeanne Diaz, ABE's product manager supervisor. "It's great because I know that they have the items whenever I file a PO, and that the transaction will move from us to 3M properly."

Building the Network

Through Trading Partner Connect's integration with Activant Prophet 21™, ABE has seen improvements in both their purchasing processes and their ability to fill orders. "We run a report in Prophet 21 that shows us exactly what we need to buy, so once we verify the quantities and pricing, we save it in Trading Partner Connect, and the PO is ready for EDI," Diaz says.

"Teaming up inventory control in Prophet 21 with Trading Partner Connect has improved our ability to keep items in stock, helping us eliminate back orders and keep our inventory cycles running," she adds.

After spending a little over a year on Trading Partner Connect, part of ABE's plan for the future is to engender the idea of the solution as a network among their industry peers. Concludes Rosete: "We're paving the road for others in our industry to adopt Trading Partner Connect so we can start sharing inventory and buying dead stock. That's the idea of it as a network: The more it grows, the more everybody benefits, and that's the idea we want to promote."

For more information on Activant's enterprise software solutions, please fill out our Web Contact Form.

Back to Top