Success Stories

Activant Prophet 21 Helps Florida-based Fastener Distributor Maintain Competitive Edge

Tropic Fasteners, Inc., an Apopka, FL-based distributor of fasteners for OEM, contract manufacturing, medical, and precision sheet metal industries, has built their business on handling things other companies would rather not focus on. "Fasteners are considered to be Class C, bottom-of-the-ladder items," says Hugh Watson, president of the company. "On a list of priorities, they typically fall down there with toilet paper and what-not. But for us, they're our bread and butter."

Tropic Fasteners, with four locations and 60 employees, had humble beginnings in the Orlando, FL area. The company was incorporated in 1984 with a limited customer base. To grow, Watson recalls that company leaders realized they had to specialize in one area of the marketplace. They chose the precision sheet metal industry, and business boomed when they started providing services that differentiated them from the norm.

Because the industry was - and remains - project-oriented, companies only wanted to buy enough pieces for specific jobs so they didn't have bloated inventories. To meet this need, Tropic Fasteners started offering no minimums and broken packages. While other companies would only sell customers lots of items in blocks of 1,000 or more, Tropic Fasteners would sell 200 or 500 at a time. Customers responded overwhelmingly.

Follow the Leader

Soon, other distributors followed in Tropic Fasteners' footsteps. "But it took years for them to catch up - and it allowed us to get established in the marketplace," Watson charges. However, to stay established in a competitive industry, Watson realizes that Tropic Fasteners must continue to offer superior and innovative customer service - and stay on the leading edge of technology.

"Technology plays a big part in how we handle everything," Watson says. Tropic Fasteners uses Activant Prophet 21 for everything from order entry to setting up consigned inventory programs. Prophet 21 provides instant information that verifies available stock at each one of the four locations, and also offers instant access to pricing, delivery, order status, and complete lot trace-ability of all the company's products. And, a huge part of Tropic Fasteners' business is comprised of utilizing technology to help them act as their customers' purchasing departments. Tropic Fasteners refers to this as vendor managed inventory, or VMI. "We're finding that our customers are offloading their purchasing requirements. We're acting as their purchasing department, and doing the tasks they used to do."

From Not Good Enough to the Best

Before moving to Prophet 21, Tropic Fasteners utilized a UNIX-based system that, according to Watson, was good, but not good enough. "The provider wasn't growing the technology," he says. "The program was limited in what it could do. It was very slow in obtaining reports and crunching numbers." When the company moved to Prophet 21, employees immediately saw a huge difference. Data was quicker and easier to access - and that was just the beginning. "I saw benefits throughout the system, from customer service to accounts payable," Watson says. "All the different capabilities were a big improvement. We didn't have a lot of things, like electronic notes that could travel throughout the system and never get lost."

But, Watson contends that the biggest improvement over the old technology is the fact that Prophet 21 is Windows-based. "When we had our old system, new employees just looked at the screen and said 'What is this?'" Watson laughs. But now, he says, because so many of the younger employees are familiar with a Windows-based environment, the time it takes new hires to learn the company's software solution has been reduced drastically. "Prophet 21 is intuitive," Watson says. And, he adds, the help functions are invaluable. "If you know how to click on help, you can teach yourself a lot. Having help right there on the screen gets a person up and running much faster."

Survival: Chameleon, not Cookie-Cutter

Watson realizes that the key to staying competitive against other fasteners distributors - both local and national - is the ability to change, and change quickly. "We must be able to change and adapt faster than our competitors," Watson says. "A lot of times, other distributors get caught up with an inflexible system."

He says that other companies - especially the very large ones - have to do things a certain way because of corporate office mandates. "We can just look at the customer and say, 'Hey, we can do anything you want us to.' Instead of having a cookie-cutter-type program, we can change the program to meet the customers' needs. That gives us a little more leverage than larger companies."

Having a software solution designed with open architecture for flexibility doesn't hurt Tropic Fasteners' chances for success either, Watson says. "Prophet 21 is a system that's flexible and that's able to grow. If technology and the industry change, we can change right along with them."

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