Success Stories

In 2001, McCann Industries of Addison, Illinois, had 11 stores and one headquarters hopping from one automated distribution system to the next. The wholesale distributor of construction supplies, equipment, and rentals owned five Case dealerships using NDS distribution software, while the rest of McCann locations used Activant Prelude™.

"As you can imagine, it was an ordeal just to pull simple sales reports," says Steve Evenson, McCann MIS manager. "We had to hand-create a lot of management data by cross-referencing two separate inventory reports, two AR reports and two general ledgers."

Then, during the summer of 2002, management decided to merge the two systems to Prelude, based on the release of Prelude's new Shop and Repair module. "The module was originally built for Toro," Evenson says. "And when Activant Prelude announced its availability, we reviewed it, liked it, and decided it offered the best functionality for running our Case dealerships in concert with our supplies, equipment, and rental business."

Evenson began converting the NDS data in-house during fall of 2002. Over the next six months, McCann IT personnel worked with Activant to customize the module and launch the first store. "We selected our most tech-savvy store as the pilot and rolled out from there," says Ray Jackson, McCann systems administrator.

With 45 out of 115 users migrating to Prelude, the change was made easier by having a bulk of experienced Prelude users on-board to help in the transition. Still, training presented a challenge, as the Shop and Repair module presented new processes to McCann's legacy Prelude users.

"The first upgraded store has been using the solution for several months now," says Jackson, "so we proved we could make it work. Fortunately, that confidence has transferred to our other stores, and we had the entire organization on Prelude by December 1."

The benefits of working on a single solution are already panning out. "Timely reports, better information, efficiency gains, less waste, better decisions. This has been a huge step forward for our company," says Evenson.

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