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How Quality Mill Supply Eased Employees' Transition to Prophet 21 CommerceCenter

YARDLEY, PA, April 27, 2005 - While Mike Baker, president of Quality Mill Supply, is serious about business, he also likes to have fun. And he finds that a little humor often helps ease transitions.

So when he chose to migrate to CommerceCenter from another Prophet 21 solution, he gave every employee a copy of Spencer Johnson's "Who Moved My Cheese" - a book about learning how to positively accept change.

To reinforce the book's messaging, he distributed cheese lapel pins to every person at each branch of the six-location company, and when someone championed the migration process, he asked them to don a Styrofoam cheese head. "It just kind of brought everything together, and got everyone on the same page," Baker says. "We want to make sure employees have a good time - especially when they're presented with challenges," says Baker.

It worked. Baker reports that his staff remains energized halfway through the CommerceCenter implementation. Despite shifting duties and changes in how the company handles many processes - from purchasing inventory to assigning item IDs - there is little friction among 80-plus employees.

"We realized that half the battle would be adopting the right frame of mind," Baker says. "People have a rough time with change. We feel that managing it better - and making it fun - has made a huge difference."

Moving Forward

A true businessperson cannot put technology in place and be done with it, says Baker: "It doesn't end there. You have to continue to move forward."

Which is why he chose to move to CommerceCenter. After working on a Prophet 21 UNIX-based solution for 15 years, Baker and other executives started noticing that new hires had difficulty learning how to key around screens. Salespeople wanted easier access to information from the road. And, with lean stock levels, real-time data about inventory availability was a must.

"These days, distribution is about information as much as it is about product," Baker says. "It's about moving information from your manufacturers to your customers as quickly as possible. It's about collecting as much information as you can about everyone you do business with - and disseminating it to people within your organization."

CommerceCenter gives Quality Mill the ability to collect - and distribute - that important data. "It gives us the ability to interact electronically with everyone we work with," Baker says. CommerceCenter will also help the company better manage his customers' inventories - a service in increasing demand. "As we do more and more vendor managed inventory (VMI) at remote locations, we need the increased connectivity," he says. "We have millions of dollars spread out at sites across the state and need to know what's happening."

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