Success Stories

What good is implementing technology to improve the quality of your business operations if it doesn't do that?

That was the question the owner and employees of Quality Tooling Inc. found themselves asking after a series of disappointing experiences with a variety of software packages.

"We've been in business for just over 20 years," said Tony Adamczyk, president of the Woodstock, Ontario-based supplier of cutting tools for industry. "When we started, we went with [Sage] DacEasy. It was a good system at the time, but they didn't update it that much. Then we ran into issues where we had problems with inventory management. Then they stopped supporting it in Canada.

"We had problems with database corruption. It got to the point where their people told us the corruption was due to our having too many inventory items."

This would become a familiar litany as Quality Tooling wandered through the software wilderness: first with a custom software package, then with Sage BusinessVision, then with QuickBooks - "The system would crash two or three times daily. Nobody would own up to the fact that we had too many inventory items for that solution to handle," said Tony Adamczyk - then back to BusinessVision again.

Deliverance from 'Three Months in Hell'

"They told us that all the corruption issues had been cleared up," said Tony Adamczyk. "We were with them again not even three months, and it was three months from hell."

Office assistant Rachel Braniff describes hell this way: "You know what BusinessVision did with our inventory? It threw it out the window. We would adjust an item, and when we went back, it would be wrong. The computer had a mind of its own. It got to where we wouldn't print an invoice unless we had picked the order first, because otherwise I would have to do ten credits a day to adjust errors."

So the company started asking other distributors what software they recommended. It turned out that the solution they endorsed was one that office manager Debbie Terluin had been interested in for a while: Activant Prophet 21, to which Quality Tooling switched in December 2007.

"Debbie had been interested in Prophet 21 before," said Rachel Braniff. "But when the boss saw the price tag, he said, 'Oh, that's too much money.' But what it came down to was that the program we were using was going to cost us even more because of all the inventory it wasn't seeing."

Faster, Easier, More Accurate

Now, with Quality Tooling on Prophet 21, the staff sees everything happening with inventory and order processing right away. "For example, in order entry, I can quickly call up the last price a customer paid for something. And when customers call in orders, they often give me information about a cutter and tell me they need parts for it," said Debbie Terluin. "With Prophet 21, you can get all the information pertaining to that cutter and its parts right in the database, so I can look things up quickly."

Both Debbie Terluin and Rachel Braniff repeatedly returned to speed, ease of use, and accuracy of information in explaining why they are thrilled to be on Prophet 21. "For me, the ability to find the information I want quickly is the most valuable feature of the solution," said Debbie Terluin. "I had never worked in an office before I came here," said Rachel Braniff. "I've now worked with all the programs this office runs, and this one is the easiest of all to use. It's really straightforward - it's all step-by-step. I find it to be very user-friendly.

"It's also great for our sales guys. They come in and they don't know a lot about what's going on here, but they try to help. With Prophet 21, I can give them things like pick tickets and send them off to get items themselves. Now the sales rep's not getting frustrated because he can't get answers, and I'm not getting frustrated with his questions."

A Zero-Tolerance Policy for Errors

Another feature Rachel Braniff likes about the software is its zero-tolerance policy for errors. "I'm doing a bank deposit as I speak," she said. "And I can't screw it up, because there are a lot of things this product won't let me screw up. It's not going to let me save an item wrong. It won't let me apply a change for an item and have a wrong result."

"Our stock is more accurate," said Debbie Terluin. "We find that the software isn't wrong - if we're ever off in a count, we can pinpoint it to human error. That's a big improvement for us, because on the other software packages we used, our inventory was always inaccurate."

Both of them noted that Prophet 21 has slashed the time they used to spend hunting down information, verifying it, and correcting errors. Tony Adamczyk has also noticed it too. "Compared to BusinessVision, we've saved 50 to 70 percent of the time we spent correcting problems, and compared to DacEasy, we've saved about 20 percent," he said. Order processing is also faster, he noted: "The software ships the order for you. You don't have to manually enter anything. And if there's something that you no longer want shipped, all you have to do is tell the software you don't want it shipped."

A Company That Listens to Its Customers

For Tony Adamczyk, just as important as the time savings and increased inventory accuracy is the support he gets from Activant. Quality Tooling did encounter rough spots in implementing and running the software, but Tony Adamczyk praised the way the Activant support team resolved them. "In the past, we have dealt with a lot of companies that were happy to sell you the software and forget about you. It is truly refreshing to find out that Activant is not one of them and that the customer is listened to," he said.

Prophet 21 also gives Quality Tooling something else the other packages didn't: Room to grow more. "Because Prophet 21 has so many different functions, Debbie and Rachel are still learning things, and we're probably running at only 50 percent of what this software is capable of," Tony Adamczyk said. And even at this early stage in the growth cycle, Rachel Braniff can identify features and add-ons that could benefit the company further along, such as the Wireless Warehouse Management Solution. "I don't think we're big enough to need it yet, but hopefully, we will in time," she said.

"We're a very small company, with only six people using our enterprise solution," Tony Adamczyk explained when asked why he initially hesitated to implement Prophet 21. Now that Quality Tooling has been live with Prophet 21 for a while, he has come to realize that it was actually the cheaper option: "The expenditure to implement Prophet 21 was high, but with all the money we spent trying to fix problems we encountered with the various other systems we used, it would have been more cost-effective to go with Prophet 21 in the first place."

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