Success Stories

When an electrical distributor has national and international companies like Graybar and Rexel competing for its business, it has to be on top of its game all across the board. The management team at Bell Electrical Supply in Santa Clara, CA, was keenly aware of this as they began to contemplate life after its former enterprise solution.

The product had served Bell well, but a string of mergers and the end of support for the hardware it ran on left the company concerned about its future. This in turn led Bell to look at its own future needs in choosing a replacement.

"We decided there were some things we were going to need to move forward as a company, and without enhancements to our enterprise solution, we wouldn't be able to do what we needed to do," said Doug Bergesen, Bell's information technology manager.

Focus on the Future and Propel Productivity

"I felt it was important to have technology that was new," said Bell CEO Burt Schraga. "We didn't want to horse around with a GUI add-on; we wanted a real Microsoft look and feel. We wanted a product that was already in the 21st century, and that was a major reason we went with Activant Prophet 21."

What they got in return was a system that has propelled productivity. "We're doing a larger volume of sales with fewer employees than we had in 2004," when Bell went live on Prophet 21, said Bergesen. In While the dot-com bust sent Bell's sales off a cliff, plunging from $20 million in 2000 to $8 million the following year, the company now does $25 million in business annually, up 25 percent from 2000 and 53 percent from 2004 levels. What's more, Bell has recovered and surpassed its 2000 sales volume with only 45 employees, a 21 percent reduction from the 57 employed in 2000.

At Home and Abroad, It Works The Same Way

That increased productivity comes in many forms. Since Prophet 21 was built from the ground up for Windows, it means that employees see and handle information in the same fashion no matter where they are or what they're using. "All of our salesmen carry laptop computers with wireless Internet cards, so they can do pricing and look up quotes right at the customer's facility," said Schraga.

"We have an employee in Denver and another in Japan, and both of them get on the system as though they were right in our office - it has the same look and feel remotely as at the branch. That makes people more comfortable and encourages them to use it as a true selling tool in the field."

And because it's Windows-based, people get comfortable with it quickly: "They only have to learn one set of screens and one set of procedures," said Bergesen.

Bell President David Wallen, who has worked for both Graybar and Rexel, noticed the advantages Prophet 21 gave Bell as soon as he came on board. "The systems Graybar and Rexel had were both DOS-based and very expensive to support," said Wallen. "And they required a patch for a graphical user interface, so the software had a different look and feel to the people in the field than it had to us in the office."

Knowledge is Power

Prophet 21's Knowledge Management Center (KMC) has also given Bell the power its executives need to run the business smarter. "We use KMC to create reports of all kinds and analyze our sales numbers in real time," said Wallen. "We can now have intelligent discussions about how much product we're selling and our margins. It helps us have better relations with our vendors by being able to have sales data in real time instead of four months after the fact."

KMC also helps Bell gain valuable leverage with its suppliers just from having the most accurate data. "One of our biggest manufacturers called not too long ago expressing concern about flat sales of their products," said Wallen. "I was able to generate a report right away showing that they weren't, and we told them, 'No, our sales are up eight percent. What do your figures show?' They looked at their figures again and saw that we were right. This led them to conclude that we were more up on their business than they were themselves.

"You can produce sales and inventory data for vendors who are just popping in for a visit while you're talking with them, and that makes meetings more productive," he added. "The more we demonstrate to our manufacturers that we're on top of our business and can speak intelligently on where it's going, the more credibility we have when we ask them for favors in the future."

Better Buying + Better Selling = Best Performance

And because Bell knows more about its business now, it buys better; a task made easier by Prophet 21's purchasing functionality. "Our purchasing people like this system a lot better than the old one," said Operations Manager Vanessa Arrington. "You can use many different methods to determine how something should be purchased, such as up-to or EOQ, and we can run them on either a per-item or a vendor-wide basis, so that allows us to delve into products and decide how they're going to be purchased, which helps our agents do a better job."

How does all this help Bell run rings around the big dogs? "Our salespeople can react to customer needs on-site with their laptops, and a lot of our competitors don't have that capability," Schraga said. "And even if they do, our customers see that our system works flawlessly, and they see that as a true value add," said Wallen.

So does one of the leading distributors' cooperatives: Affiliated Distributors named Bell the 2007 Affiliate of the Year for Performance based on its growth and modeling of best practices.

Plenty of Power for Future Growth

Perhaps the most important feature of Prophet 21 is how little of its power Bell has used so far. "If this is an eight-cylinder engine, I'd say we're running on three-and-a-half cylinders," said Arrington. "I've drilled down into every module, and it has a lot of capabilities that we really haven't tapped into. I'm waiting for the day when we can utilize them all."

That day will come sooner rather than later if Bell grows according to plan. Having just absorbed into the parent company a controls subsidiary it owned for 10 years, Bell now plans to add branches in order to reach $100 million in sales. "With the way the system allows you to handle multiple locations, it makes it easy to add branches," Wallen said. "You don't have to hire an extra crew to handle all the data input - you can do it with your existing crew."

And if Bell has achieved all of this running on only three-and-a-half cylinders, imagine how much it might do running on all eight.

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