Success Stories

Activant Application Consultant Helps Get Distributor Back on Track

When Deb Elgin took Donovan Industries live on Prophet 21, she knew that the solution was easy-to-use - and thought reading a few brochures and taking some basic classes would be all the company needed for a successful implementation.

"We were wrong," she admits. While she says that training courses proved excellent for people performing order entry and other administrative tasks, she now knows that she - and other managers and executives - needed to learn about the business processes and theories behind Prophet 21 before going live. "We should have listened to the Implementation Consultant," she says.

Activant strongly recommends that all customers work with an Implementation Consultant and follow a proven process when going live on an enterprise software solution. Implementation consulting includes an assessment of your business processes and combines consulting and training offerings in a customized program to best meet your business' needs. This implementation process helps to shorten the learning curve for all of your employees and gets your business live quickly.

Recovery

After struggling with inventory management functionality for 11 months, Elgin called on an Activant Application Consultant for help. "We hit a wall," she says. "There wasn't anything wrong with the solution. We just didn't know how it worked. We were starting to lose customers. At one point, we had $270,000 in backorders.

"The consultant came in, looked through our solution, and explained how we could leverage it to get our inventory back on target," says Elgin. It took two days of intense process training and two months of effectively using the solution to turn things around completely.

The consultant also helped Elgin determine how to apply certain inventory management methods to groups of SKUs to increase movement while cutting expenditures. "We learned how we could truly use Prophet 21," she said. "Before, we were treading water. Now we're really using the solution to drive our business."

After working with the consultant, service levels are better than ever - hovering at about 97 percent - while overall inventory value has dropped by about 17 percent. "It was a huge turnaround for us."

"Hindsight is 20/20," Elgin concludes. "If we had listened to our Implementation Consultant, and had followed the implementation process Activant recommended, we could have avoided all of this and been that much further ahead today."

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