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Wednesday, March 27, 2019

Eastern Industrial Supplies Harnesses Big Data With Phocas

Eastern Industrial Supplies is an independently owned distributor of pipe, valves, fittings and commercial plumbing products. Based in Greenville, S.C., Eastern has 16 branches and 3 support locations across the southeastern United States generating more than $100 million in annual revenue.


Dennis Karpinski, director of e-commerce and business analysis at Eastern Industrial Supplies had this to say about the company utilizing Phocas, “Automating our financial statements was a major step for our company, and is already saving time and resources,” said Karpinski. “Branch managers, regional managers and executives now have access to dashboards that give them a snapshot of what is happening with the business, including one-day, month-to-date, year-to-date sales; gross profit percentages; and average sales per invoice, among other data points.”


The biggest impact of Phocas was the ability to recreate branch and corporate income statements and balance sheets. Phocas has automated a manual process, allowing managers to access the financial information that is relevant to them and their specific locations. Once the controller completes the financial statements, an email is sent with a link that gives everyone access to the reports.


Beyond the financial statements, Karpinski has created a variety of dashboards that make it quick and easy to access and analyze data for several areas of the business. Karpinski created inside and outside sales dashboards that allow sales reps to see what they are doing by month-to-date and year-to-date with variances. One of the company’s biggest costs is freight, so Karpinski created a dashboard that highlights month-to-date and year-to-date freight-based spending. The data tracks how branches are billing, collecting or allocating freight costs.


Procurement is also now using Phocas to track the number of months of inventory on hand and monitor particular price lines for how much is in stock, how much is committed, and how much is associated with a bid and not an open order. Recently, new international steel tariffs were announced, which could have enormous impacts on Eastern’s pipe, valves and fittings business. Procurement came to Karpinski looking for data on piping price lines, specifically how many are on hand, committed, sold and their average cost. The department is using the data to determine what they need to buy in light of the tariffs, what products they need to unload and where the company’s average product costs will be below the tariffs so they can protect their cost advantage.


“We can now take the data that has always been there, manipulate it and distribute it quicker than we have ever done in the past. This is already having a significant impact on our ability to make decisions about expenses that are coming up, reducing and moving inventory, identifying purchasing needs and what products are not moving. We could not get where we are today without Phocas. The data is finally usable and in the people’s hands that need it.”


To learn more, visit the Phocas Newsroom.


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