Success Stories

People Make the Difference When Converting to Activant Acclaim

By John Landrum, President of Landrum Supply Company

(excerpted from a letter to Chuck Boyle, president of Activant)

As president of Landrum Supply Co. in Augusta, GA, I was always impressed with the way people at Activant seemed to take a sincere interest in all of Activant's customers and in me as an individual customer, and I would describe myself as a supportive, but very unhappy user - past tense.

I had converted from a non-working business system to Activant XL in March of 1997. The transition could not have gone worse. In hindsight, we were partially at fault. No one at Landrum Supply wanted to make the change. Most of the staff did not want to operate on a computer system at all. Unfortunately, they did not have the knowledge to communicate their concerns or the patience to learn, and Activant's front line support did not have the ability to communicate with non-technical customers. The result was terrible. After about a year, we figured out a good way to operate the system and swore we would never go through that experience again. If it had not been for a few people at Activant we would not be here today.

A few years later, my Activant sales representative tried his best to convert me to Activant Acclaim. He convinced me that it was an excellent operating system with many usable features, but he could not get me to overcome my fears from the last time we attempted a conversion. My company was able to work with XL and that was good enough.

Then I received a call from our rep's manager. He was very direct and convinced me of two important things: First, Activant had converted almost all of their XL customers and had a system that worked. Second, I did not have a choice - Support for XL would continue to decrease as fewer and fewer Activant customers used XL.

I had barely hung up the phone when hardware started to arrive. When our Activant implementation consultant called to introduce herself and explain I had to adjust the implementation schedule, I said I was going to send back the hardware and call the whole thing off. It was a bad year, a bad time of the year, and nobody here wanted to make the change - all of the old memories were too fresh.

When I told her I was bailing out she did not give me any quick answers or excuses, rather she asked for an opportunity to research solutions to my problems. She convinced me of many things during that process, but the most important was that Activant had an implementation plan that worked and if I would commit to following it, our conversion would go well.

I asked everyone at Landrum Supply to commit to the plan 110 percent because, as I explained, when the implementation did not work as well as Activant said, I did not want any fingers pointing at us.

A few problems arose early on, but our implementation consultant put them behind us so quickly that people began to believe.

Our system administrator studied the books and we went to Activant conversion classes. When she had a question she e-mailed Activant support and got an answer. We converted from XL all the way to Acclaim 12. She read all three-conversion manuals and got answers to all the system administration, as well as all of the accounting, questions answered in advance. The priority status Activant puts on customers during this phase of the implementation process works great. By the time we started the actual conversion all our system administrator had to worry about was making sure the computer was running.

We had custom designed a learning program for employees using Computer-Based Training disks from Activant. I required all salespeople to complete it on their own time and all hourly employees to work on it from 4:00 to 5:00 p.m.

All of the work paid off. We started conversion on a Friday night and finished late Saturday afternoon. We never called support. Midway through Tuesday morning (Monday was a holiday) my warehouse manager came to me and told me he did not see what all of the fuss was about, Acclaim was great and the counter people were already finding new ways to use it. This is when I knew we had made it!

I never thought we could make such a major conversion with so little disruption to business. Sure, we put in some extra hours but it was worth it. Activant's implementation plan works and the benefits of Acclaim have already begun to make an impact. Everyone at Activant made a tremendous effort to ensure the conversion was a success. Activant has truly become an integral and contributing part of my business!

John Landrum is president of Landrum Supply Company. Landrum Supply, based in Augusta, GA, has two locations providing plumbing fixtures and supplies. This case study was excerpted from an unsolicited letter to Chuck Boyle, president CEO of Activant.

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