Success Stories

Activant Application Consultant Helps Electronics Distributor Gain Competitive Edge

When Bryan Menard became system administrator at Menard Electronics, Inc., he was shocked to see how little the staff utilized their Activant solution. "We were running two systems," says Menard. "Everything - including the ledger - was being hand written before it was entered into our solution. Time management and data accuracy were huge issues."

A small company with branches in Louisiana and Texas, Menard Electronics, Inc. could not afford that kind of inefficiency if it hoped to compete with its larger competitors. Realizing drastic changes had to take place, Menard decided to bring in an Activant application consultant.

"It was a tough sell to management," recalls Menard. "They thought our Activant solution ran terribly, but it wasn't the solution - it was the usage. We were pushing paper simply because we weren't maximizing our technology."

Soon after arriving, the Activant consultant told Menard that his company had to commit to one system if they were to move forward. "The manual system was so inefficient, and it required a large amount of people to support it," recalls Menard. "We had to go with our Activant solution, and when we did, so many steps were cut out of the process. We didn't have to expend resources to support the old system anymore."

Cleaning House

With two systems running independently of each other, it's no surprise that inventory control at Menard Electronics was problematic. Since part numbers and prices were entered manually, employees didn't trust the information in the solution, which meant they had to research price changes in vendor catalogs for every order.

"Our inventory suffered from what I call 'sprinkle dot syndrome,'" laughs Menard. "Every part number was different. A dash here, a few periods there - we had no uniformity in our naming, and you can't update prices when part numbers are wrong."

The first order of business for the Activant application consultant was consolidating inventory information. According to Menard, when the part numbers were corrected, the effect was "staggering."

"Immediately, our inventory value went down about 25 percent. She showed us a lot of features in our solution we didn't even know existed, specifically in terms of item clean-up," Menard says. "She ran procedures to remove items that hadn't moved in five years. Our item database instantly went from about 100,000 stock items to 7,500."

Ship Shape

Another Activant solution feature the consultant helped Menard Electronics utilize was ship scans. In the previous set-up, salespeople manually printed ship tickets and hand-delivered them to receiving. In a ship-scan situation, anything allocated prints automatically, speeding the process.

"The flow of material is unbelievable now," says Menard. "Using the ship scans saves our warehouse guys time because they're no longer waiting around for manually printed tickets. And we've cut a minimum of one day off of every shipment - material comes in and goes out on the same day."

With inventory under control and shipping processes streamlined, Menard Electronics has stepped up its game. "We can now compete on the level of our competitors," Menard says. "We're not deficient on any level. We can respond as quickly as anybody else - we couldn't do that before."

When asked if he would recommend using an Activant application consultant to another distributor, Menard's response is emphatic: "Do it. Activant consultants are in the best position to tell you what works and what doesn't, because they are out there with the customers every day of the week. These are highly skilled individuals - why not put them to work for you?"

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

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

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