Industrial Paper Products

A Prophet 21 Success Story

Features

Prophet 21 Gives Janitorial Distributor the Flexibility to Serve Multiple Industries

A Sophisticated Solution

The employees of Industrial Paper Products pride themselves on being a one-stop shop for customers in the janitorial supply industry. Founded in 1973 as a paper distributor, the company soon expanded to include service to the packaging, food service, and safety industries.

Challenge:

Help a Burlington, NC-based janitorial supplies wholesaler get better control over rebates and inventory.

Solutions:

Prophet 21

Benefits:

Detailed rebate tracking puts more money to the bottom line
SQL Database makes pulling reports simple
More flexibility in inventory control
Dedication to research and development

In the spring of 2004, Pete James, vice president of Industrial Paper, along with the company's management team made the decision to implement Prophet 21, a leading enterprise software solution that combines the power of SQL Server and the familiarity of Windows in a solution designed especially for distributors.

"Our customers are becoming more sophisticated every day," says James. "We purchased Prophet 21 because we needed a solution that we could grow with and would grow with us."

Flexibility and Control

Since Prophet 21 uses a SQL Server database, it has tremendous flexibility in querying data for reports. It was this functionality that first drew the management team of Industrial Paper to consider the solution. Says James, "Prophet 21 facilitates research tremendously - it's so easy to query and create your own ad-hoc reports, which we do on a daily basis."

Rebate tracking is another feature of the solution that the employees of Industrial Paper utilize. Prophet 21 ties rebates directly to order processing, making them easier to track, which can help maximize the amount of money earned.

"We recently had an auditor onsite to evaluate our rebates," says James. "She was extremely impressed to see how easily rebates flowed through Prophet 21."

Into the Future

Maintaining healthy inventory is all about control, a truth that, according to James, Prophet 21 takes to heart: "Packaging is not the same as janitorial, and janitorial is not the same as safety," James says. "Prophet 21 gives us the flexibility to use up to four different methods of determining inventory levels (i.e., min-max for some groups of items, and up-to for others), which is especially important for a distributor that services multiple industries."

Looking ahead, James is confident that going with Prophet 21 was the right decision. "One of the things I like about dealing with Activant, is that I feel like they are dedicated to developing and improving the system," she says. "They once sent a team of four people out to speak with me about ways I thought the solution could work even better - I was very encouraged by that. I know that Activant is the right company to take us into the future."

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