Success Stories

Like most distributors, Joel Lovell, general manager of Great Lakes Fasteners & Supply, has to find a constant balance between ever-tightening margins and increasing customer demands. And despite being relatively inexpensive items, fasteners have a tendency to gather costs on their way to a customer, whether in handling, shipping, or secondary processes.

"I can't pass production costs or price increases on to our customers," remarks Lovell, "so we have to make up for them in productivity."

In the past, when the executives at Great Lakes wanted to increase productivity, they would just add manpower, but that policy changed when they decided to implement Activant Prophet 21™ and its optional Wireless Warehouse Management Solution (WWMS).

"As our business grows and evolves, customers will continue to demand more service for the product we're selling, and we don't want to add people to handle that," explains Lovell. "By streamlining operations, Prophet 21 will take some of that pressure off of us and help increase productivity."

The Next Level

A full-line distributor that specializes in OEM production fasteners, Great Lakes Fasteners & Supply's two locations have been serving customers in the western Michigan region and growing steadily since 1946. For the last 22 years, employees at the company depended on Activant� Faspac as their business system, but according to Lovell, they needed a solution that could take them to the next level.

"For more than two decades, Faspac did the job we needed it to do," says Lovell, "but we got to a point where we simply outgrew its capabilities. We needed a system that could do more in the way of purchasing and warehousing and Prophet 21 was the answer."

Lovell and the executives at Great Lakes decided in 2005 to implement Prophet 21, Activant's enterprise solution that combines the power of SQL Server and the familiarity of Windows in a package designed especially for distributors. Having recently gone live on Prophet 21, Lovell looks forward to harnessing its forecasting capabilities.

"Once we build up some history, Prophet 21's purchasing functionality will help us identify our trends and we'll see where we can buy better," explains Lovell. "The plan is to switch to Up-To or EOQ in the next few months."

Looking Long Term

When Great Lakes implemented Prophet 21, Lovell had his sights set on two areas of the business he felt needed improvement: purchasing and the warehouse. With a plan in place to switch to a more precise forecasting model in the near future, they turned to WWMS for an increase in warehouse productivity.

"We have a fairly large warehouse at 100,000 square feet, and the travel sequence through the warehouse just eats up a lot of time," says Lovell. "We're looking for the most efficient way around so we can eliminate many of those footsteps."

One way WWMS helps Great Lakes chart a better path around the warehouse is with its ABC ranking functionality, which flags the fastest moving items with an "A" and slower moving items with a "C" and so on. Having this differentiation between slow and fast moving items allows receiving employees to prioritize an item's placement in the warehouse.

"An 'A' item should never be on some high, hard-to-reach shelf," contends Lovell. "Activant's Wireless Warehouse solution helps us make sure that the best sellers are quick and easy to pick."

Lovell also looks forward to some of the new features that will be available with the release of Prophet 21 version 11.0, especially in the areas of group picking and self-directed put-aways. "Prophet 21 and WWMS are great solutions now and promise to only get better as Activant continues to add functionality and enhancements," he concludes. "We're looking long term and we've been very impressed with the investments they're putting into the solutions for future growth."

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

Back to Top