Northwest Bearing and Industrial Supplies

An Activant Prophet 21 Success Story

Features

Activant Prophet 21 Helps Bearings and Industrial Supply Distributor Get a Life Outside the Office

Over the past 15 years, Bob Mitchell, owner of NorthWest Bearing and Industrial Supplies, has missed out on a lot of hunting and fishing. After years of 70-hour weeks, he wants to spend time on a few other things: His family. Fixing things around the house. Raising his dogs.

Challenge:

Help a Woodward, OK-based distributor spend less time at work while better managing his business

Solutions:

Activant Prophet 21

Benefits:

Reduced time at the office by almost 30 percent
Increased profit margins by 3 percent
Stabilized inventory investments while sales increased by 18 percent

Luckily, Activant Prophet 21 has enabled Mitchell to cut the number of hours he logs at the office - reducing his regular workweek to a mere 50 hours - without jeopardizing the business he has sacrificed so much for.

"Prophet 21 is a lot faster than the UNIX system we were using before," Mitchell explains. And, because Prophet 21 is so easy to use, Mitchell can delegate many of the tasks - like item edits and data entry - he once handled himself: "Because it's Windows-based instead of green-screen, Prophet 21 isn't foreign to my younger employees like our last system was."

Increasing Margins

Like every distributor, Mitchell sometimes struggles to maintain good profit margins. "And because we specialize in American-made items, it's even more difficult," he says. "Imported filters, bearings, and hydraulic products are usually a lot cheaper than what we sell."

Before moving to Prophet 21, Mitchell couldn't control what his sales representatives could view on their workstations - and each user could see any item's actual cost. Consequently, they would often offer customers prices that barely covered manufacturer price - significantly reducing NorthWest Bearing's profit margins.

Mitchell uses Prophet 21's DynaChange feature to hide actual item costs from his sales force, which has helped increase profit margins by about three percent.

"If my guys can't see the item's actual cost, they're far less likely to override a price," he says. "And when we stick to selling at prices at least 10 percent higher than what we pay, we're virtually guaranteed to increase margins."

Holding the Line

Prophet 21's sophisticated - yet easy-to-maintain - inventory management functionality has helped Mitchell hold the line on stock investments, even while sales have increased by about 18 percent.

"I only used Min-Max before and was a control freak about everything on my shelves," Mitchell says, of the fixed control purchasing method. "With 14,000 SKUs, it was pretty tough." Because he is more confident in Prophet 21's inventory management capabilities, Mitchell now uses Up-To, a variable control purchasing method. "It takes the emotion out of purchasing," he says. As a result, inventory levels have remained flat while his company grows steadily.

Mitchell now says that he wishes he never hesitated to move from a UNIX platform. "I needed to be convinced to move away from my green screen," he remembers. "I saw Windows-based solutions as things that locked up and crashed with viruses."

Now, he knows he was wrong: "Prophet 21 more than paid for itself within a year of implementation. Margins and sales are up, inventory is down, and my employees are more efficient than ever. Plus, it's incredibly stable."

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