Pete Koury remembers when contacting other distributors to find out-of-stock inventory was hardly worth his while.

"The costs involved were so high that it wasn't worth wasting our time," says the president of Toledo Abrasive & Supply Co. "You'd have to call multiple distributors and spend hours on the phone. It was like playing Go-Fish." Now, Trading Partner Connect, Activant's Internet trading network, lets Koury - and hundreds of other distributors in trusted, permissions-based relationships - see each other's hands. Trading Partner Connect, the fastest growing Internet trading network for distributors, streamlines processes between manufacturers/suppliers and distributors by enabling them to exchange data directly from their backend systems. Distributors can see real-time availability information, receive order acknowledgements and invoices, and update pricing electronically, thus eliminating the need to re-key information. In addition to using Trading Partner Connect to send suppliers purchase orders and source non-stocks and out-of-stocks from other distributors, Koury regularly scours the network for inventory collecting dust in other distributors' warehouses. "It's a great way to buy something you normally carry at a fraction of the price," Koury says. "We've been able to increase our profit margins on certain items by more than 20 percent."

Best of all, Koury and his staff don't need to make phone calls to find marked-down stock because Trading Partner Connect does the work for them. When Ken Plecko, Toledo's purchasing agent, runs requirement reports, the company's Activant solution automatically queries the network database and notifies him of any dead stock in trading partners' warehouses. "Before Trading Partner Connect, it would have taken entirely too much time and effort to figure out the logistics of who had what, where," Plecko says. "Now, that information is accessible through a few keystrokes."

Toledo Abrasives buys roughly $15,000 worth of other distributors' inactive inventory each year. Because it is company policy to buy dead stock only when it costs a minimum of 20 percent less than it would to purchase it from a manufacturer, that equates to thousands of dollars in savings.

"Using Trading Partner Connect to buy dead stock from other distributors is really a win-win situation," Koury says. "We make a larger margin, and another distributor recovers costs he might have otherwise kissed goodbye."

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