Success Stories

"We couldn't communicate with the modern day world - we were in the dark ages."

When talking about his company's in-house business system, which ran on an IBM AS400 mainframe, James Meyer, vice president of Meyer Gage Company, Inc., admits they were behind the times. "Whether you're talking about storing records electronically or being able to e-mail and fax directly from the solution - we couldn't do any of that," he says. "We used to joke that our system was a glorified invoicing and pick ticket machine, just a step up from a typewriter."

When Meyer decided in 2003 to start looking for a new solution to power his business, the first thing he considered was the technology his customers were using. "We thought about what we could do to align ourselves a little bit more with our customers," he explains. "Turns out, the majority of them were using an Activant solution."

Looking to both improve his company's ability to interact with a technologically complex business world and create an easier path to communicate with customers, Meyer chose to implement Activant Prophet 21™. Built from the ground up, Prophet 21 combines the familiarity of Windows with the power of SQL Server to provide distributors with a highly customizable solution designed to increase sales, improve customer service, and reduce operating costs.

Quality Control

A manufacturer and distributor of gages designed for convenient hole and bore measurement, Meyer Gage Company has been family-owned and operated since its inception in 1960. According to Meyer, while the majority of the company's product is sold through industrial distributors, he sees the greatest need for gages coming from the aerospace and military sectors.

"Gages are basically in-process, quality control instruments," says Meyer. "Aerospace and military machinists are always tearing down, rebuilding, or refurbishing equipment, so it's no surprise that they rely heavily on our products."

With such a sophisticated customer base, it follows that Meyer Gage Company would need a solution to match, so they "weren't held hostage by uncommunicative technology." The open architecture of Prophet 21 offers unlimited integration and customization opportunities, which Meyer capitalized on by adding integrated faxing and credit card solutions.

On the old AS400 system, Meyer Gage employees had to handle transactions manually - handwriting purchase orders and printing invoices on a dot matrix printer - and they kept hard copies on file for three years. Now with Prophet 21 and the integrated faxing solution, they create purchase orders on the fly during order entry, and send and file documents electronically.

"Just to send out invoices and monthly statements, we were spending somewhere between $1,000 and $1,500 a month on paper and postage," remarks Meyer. "Now that everything's electronic and we can fax statements and invoices, we've reduced that number to $130 a month - that's a huge savings right there."

Meyer Gage Company has also had success with the integrated credit card solution for Prophet 21, watching their credit transactions jump from five to at least 75 a week. "We hated processing credit transactions manually," says Meyer. "Now we're promoting them with incentive programs like free shipping on certain order sizes."

The Name of the Game

According to Meyer, the name of the return on investment (ROI) game with Prophet 21 is timesavings, the most significant of which result from the solution's streamlined end-of-day procedures. "Our old system wasn't real time, which meant we had to spend an hour a day backing up our data and closing out the day," he says. "Now it takes five minutes."

On the AS400, Meyer Gage Company would start shutting down the system at 4:30 in order to close an hour later. Now, Prophet 21 enables them to close the day out at 4:55 for a 5:00 closing time, effectively giving them an extra half hour of productivity while shortening the workday. Adds Meyer, "It also enhances our customer service, because the solution isn't down for any significant amount of time."

Meyer Gage Company employees have also been able to take more customer calls a day thanks to streamlined procedures with Prophet 21, and the results have hit the bottom line. "Our sales have gone up 20 to 23 percent over two years, and we haven't had any price increases," concludes Meyer. "And there isn't a facet of the solution that isn't saving us time."

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