ALP Lighting Gains Big Data Insights with Phocas

ALP Lighting manufactures and distributes Lighting Components to OEM Lighting fixture manufacturers across the globe. With six manufacturing plants and three distribution facilities, ALP has about 1,000 customers and nearly 10,000 different SKUs. The Chief Operating Officer of ALP Lighting, David Brown, shares some key comments about Phocas Business Intelligence Software and the benefits it has brought to ALP.

• “We tried using other BI tools and most were just too complex for users. We had several home grown data retrieval systems that served us well but they were slow and inflexible. Phocas opened a whole new world of data accessibility for us”.
• “Phocas does so much for our staff. The sales people love it because it is incredibly easy to use and they have detailed information at their fingertips. How much volume have we done in a given territory? How does it compare to the prior period? Which customers are up? Down? Which product lines are up? Down? What are the margins by customer or by product line, product class, or individual SKU? Phocas makes information so easily available that we operate in a different manner than before! We have different expectations about what people should know about their areas of responsibility”.
• “The information that we get from Phocas allows us to make better business decisions. In fact, Phocas information is a staple in all of our meetings. We are even planning to use Phocas externally in the near future – in meetings with customers and suppliers”.
• “Of all the tools we evaluated, Phocas was the most reasonably priced and its ease of use makes it incredibly effective. This will be by far the easiest to implement, most usable business intelligence system you will find. Phocas is Business intelligence that you can actually use”.

To learn more about Phocas Business Intelligence, and read additional case studies, white papers, and customer reviews, visit the Phocas Newsroom.

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Developed through a partnership with Industrial Distribution, Industrial Supply, Contractor Supply Magazine and the Brown Smith Wallace Consulting Group, these 12 page Supplement Guides provide valuable, independently researched information. Each Guide details software company information, identifies vertical markets, highlights functions and technology features, new developments to the software package, shows graphs of the user range, basic entry price point, sales channel (how and where the software is sold), along with company contact information. The Supplement Guides provide everything you need to know when beginning your software selection and evaluation process.

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Tour de Force Releases Tour de Force Cloud CRM BI Solution

Tour de Force, Inc., a customer relationship management (CRM) and business intelligence (BI) enterprise software solution provider for the distribution and manufacturing industries, recently announce the release of Tour de Force Cloud.

Tour de Force Cloud is a web-based CRM and BI solution that provides analytics, reporting, and dashboards. The system integrates with a client’s existing ERP/business system to extract ERP data and pre-calculate over 1,000 key data points about each customer, every single day – transforming raw sales data into actionable reports and analytics.. This actionable data can be used to identify trends, optimize business processes, and impact sales and revenues.

In addition to providing a full range of business intelligence functionality, Tour de Force Cloud also provides accelerated tools for managing relationships with customers, prospects, and vendors, including Account and Contact management, and automatic Email Logging without the need for manual user interaction.

Whether a small business with few IT resources or part of a large enterprise where corporate IT is stretched thinly, Tour de Force Cloud accelerates the clients’ time to value by eliminating the need to acquire, configure and maintain on-site application and database server infrastructure.

While Tour de Force has traditionally been used extensively in the distribution and manufacturing industries, Tour de Force is also used by other leading B2B organizations including those in the construction and technology industries among others. For more information about Tour de Force, Inc. and Tour de Force Cloud, visit www.tourdeforceinc.com.

New Software Research Guides Available Finding that you cannot keep up with all the changes in the latest software? Want to know how the software's features and functions can assist you? Please contact snelson@bswllc.com for more information about these latest editions.

Read our 2016 Mid-Year Supplements. 

Developed through a partnership with Industrial Distribution, Industrial Supply, Contractor Supply Magazine and the Brown Smith Wallace Consulting Group, these 12 page Supplement Guides provide valuable, independently researched information. Each Guide details software company information, identifies vertical markets, highlights functions and technology features, new developments to the software package, shows graphs of the user range, basic entry price point, sales channel (how and where the software is sold), along with company contact information. The Supplement Guides provide everything you need to know when beginning your software selection and evaluation process.

Visit our website to learn more about the Brown Smith Wallace Consulting Group and to use our Software Features Comparison Wizard.

Lineage Logistics Selects Infor's Cloud-Based Supply Chain

Infor, a provider of business applications specialized by industry and built for the cloud, recently announced that Lineage Logistics has successfully implemented Infor Supply Chain Execution (SCE) version 10.3 in a cloud-hosted environment. Lineage, one of the largest temperature-controlled warehousing and logistics companies in the world, sought to improve process efficiencies while consolidating Warehouse Management Systems (WMS). By moving to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model for hosting core supply chain systems, Lineage is able to create a more stable and more scalable business ecosystem, which can help them deliver better inventory visibility and more dynamic allocation to their customers. As a logistics provider, Lineage serves customers that operate with considerable sensitivities to disruptions or delays, which made it critical to find a strategic partner like Infor to help deliver a more rapid, yet made-to-order, implementation process.  

Lineage supports a wide variety of WMS systems as a result of various acquisitions activities made over the last several years. To help improve enterprise-wide processes, the organization is undertaking a consolidation initiative with the goal of making each warehouse activity more efficient. Lineage selected Infor as one of their strategic partners for this initiative to help minimize disruptions and delays that could impact Lineage customers. In choosing and implementing Infor SCE in the cloud, Lineage gains a highly scalable solution that combines enhanced warehouse management functionality, labor management, and 3PL billing and transportation execution in a single, unified cloud-enabled solution.

To read more about the Lineage implementation and Infor's cloud-based supply chain solution, visit the Infor newsroom.

New Software Research Guides Available Finding that you cannot keep up with all the changes in the latest software? Want to know how the software's features and functions can assist you? Please contact snelson@bswllc.com for more information about these latest editions.

Read our 2016 Mid-Year Supplements. 

Developed through a partnership with Industrial Distribution, Industrial Supply, Contractor Supply Magazine and the Brown Smith Wallace Consulting Group, these 12 page Supplement Guides provide valuable, independently researched information. Each Guide details software company information, identifies vertical markets, highlights functions and technology features, new developments to the software package, shows graphs of the user range, basic entry price point, sales channel (how and where the software is sold), along with company contact information. The Supplement Guides provide everything you need to know when beginning your software selection and evaluation process.

Visit our website to learn more about the Brown Smith Wallace Consulting Group and to use our Software Features Comparison Wizard.

 

Real Estate Developer Experiences Speed and Scalability with NetSuite

NetSuite recently announced that Juan D. Nepomuceno Sons, a 36-year-old company which develops and leases commercial and residential real estate in the Philippines, has deployed NetSuite to modernize its business processes and support rapid business growth as well as manage end-to-end financial processes, from quote-to-cash and procurement to financial consolidation and reporting.

JDN Sons selected NetSuite to provide its financial management processes with greater speed, visibility and scalability as it prepares for the 2016 opening of a new commercial building called Entec II. Prior to the NetSuite implementation, JDN Sons used a 20-year-old legacy DOS-based application that resulted in lengthy delays to generate financial reports, high degrees of manual reporting, high costs for finance and accounting personnel, and a risk of inaccurate information. Modernizing its infrastructure with NetSuite has given JDN Sons the scalability to handle the company’s new developments, and to further grow its roster of more than 750 commercial tenants, while avoiding the need to hire additional accounting personnel.

Since deploying NetSuite, JDN Sons has been able to:

•Improve overall financial management efficiency by more than 50 percent, while achieving greater visibility into key financial metrics like expenses and tenant information based on real-time data.

•Reduce IT costs and better leverage resources to support operations at Entec II in Angeles City, a 26,000-square-meter space which will house about 120 tenants, including consumer-facing businesses and several large business process outsourcing (BPO) and IT firms. The new building is expected to generate roughly P15 million in monthly income, exceeding that of Nepo Mall, a shopping mall in Angeles City with about 200 tenants.

•Re-evaluate and evolve its business processes to become faster and more transparent with greater end-to-end controls.

To read more, visit the NetSuite News Blog.

New Software Research Guides Available Finding that you cannot keep up with all the changes in the latest software? Want to know how the software's features and functions can assist you? Please contact snelson@bswllc.com for more information about these latest editions.

Read our 2016 Mid-Year Supplements. 

Developed through a partnership with Industrial Distribution, Industrial Supply, Contractor Supply Magazine and the Brown Smith Wallace Consulting Group, these 12 page Supplement Guides provide valuable, independently researched information. Each Guide details software company information, identifies vertical markets, highlights functions and technology features, new developments to the software package, shows graphs of the user range, basic entry price point, sales channel (how and where the software is sold), along with company contact information. The Supplement Guides provide everything you need to know when beginning your software selection and evaluation process.

Visit our website to learn more about the Brown Smith Wallace Consulting Group and to use our Software Features Comparison Wizard.

Vaillant Industrial Selects QAD's DynaSys Cloud Production Planning

DynaSys, a division of QAD Inc., and a leading provider of demand and supply chain planning solutions, recently announced that Vaillant Industrial, one of Europe's leading heating and boiler manufacturing companies, will implement the DynaSys Cloud Production Planning solution to improve its manufacturing planning process.

DynaSys provides integrated and collaborative planning solution that allows businesses to optimize their supply chains, including sales and operations planning, demand planning, and network, inventory and business resources optimizations. DynaSys software enables customers to meet their goals of better managing Demand and Supply Chain Planning, and becoming more effective enterprises.

Vaillant was founded in 1874 and is currently the second-largest company in the European heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) industry. Its core business centers on the development and distribution of energy-saving, environmentally friendly heating systems and water heaters based on natural gas and renewable energy sources.

After investigating several demand and supply chain solutions, Vaillant chose DynaSys for the following reasons:
•A comprehensive production planning tool.
•The ability to easily incorporate DynaSys Demand Planning.
•The Cloud model was best for their business.
•A structured Easy On Boarding project methodology.

To learn more about QAD Inc. and DynaSys Cloud Production Planning, and read additional case studies and customer testimonials, visit the QAD Newsroom.

New Software Research Guides Available Finding that you cannot keep up with all the changes in the latest software? Want to know how the software's features and functions can assist you? Please contact snelson@bswllc.com for more information about these latest editions.

Read our 2016 Mid-Year Supplements. 

Developed through a partnership with Industrial Distribution, Industrial Supply, Contractor Supply Magazine and the Brown Smith Wallace Consulting Group, these 12 page Supplement Guides provide valuable, independently researched information. Each Guide details software company information, identifies vertical markets, highlights functions and technology features, new developments to the software package, shows graphs of the user range, basic entry price point, sales channel (how and where the software is sold), along with company contact information. The Supplement Guides provide everything you need to know when beginning your software selection and evaluation process.

Visit our website to learn more about the Brown Smith Wallace Consulting Group and to use our Software Features Comparison Wizard.

McCray Lumber and Millwork Improves Customer Service With Agility DMSi

McCray Lumber and Millwork provides building materials, including lumber, windows and interior millwork, to the Kansas City area. The company has 5 lumberyards, 1 millwork facility and 80 employees. McCray's customers are primarily single and multi-family homebuilders. 

McCray’s sales team wanted a better way to serve their customers in the field - especially when they wanted change requests to existing orders. With their original system, the sales rep would call one of McCray’s dispatchers to request information and make the changes. This slow, manual process created more work for McCray’s dispatchers and caused problems for the sales reps too as they didn't have immediate access to information.

The McCray team decided to try the Agility Sales mobile app from DMSi Software. The Agility software is specialized for building materials and manages every step of the product cycle, from purchasing and receiving to sales and billing and allows users access to key account information such as open A/R, existing order status, pending deliveries, customer pricing and item availability.

The Agility app accesses data over a basic wireless or cellular network which was another feature of interest to the McCray sales team. Since implementing, the Agility Sales app has helped to keep projects on track and provide good service - proving to be a game changer for how McCray serves its homebuilders and in turn, their customers.

To read more, and see other case studies of the Agility app, visit the DMSi Newsroom.

New Software Research Guides Available Finding that you cannot keep up with all the changes in the latest software? Want to know how the software's features and functions can assist you? Please contact snelson@bswllc.com for more information about these latest editions.

Read our 2016 Mid-Year Supplements. 

Developed through a partnership with Industrial Distribution, Industrial Supply, Contractor Supply Magazine and the Brown Smith Wallace Consulting Group, these 12 page Supplement Guides provide valuable, independently researched information. Each Guide details software company information, identifies vertical markets, highlights functions and technology features, new developments to the software package, shows graphs of the user range, basic entry price point, sales channel (how and where the software is sold), along with company contact information. The Supplement Guides provide everything you need to know when beginning your software selection and evaluation process.

Visit our website to learn more about the Brown Smith Wallace Consulting Group and to use our Software Features Comparison Wizard.

Merrow Sewing Gains Opportunities With Kenandy Cloud ERP

Merrow Sewing Machine Company of Fall River, Massachusetts began as Merrow Mills back in 1838—the country’s first manufacturer of knitted cotton goods. The company is also credited with inventing the overlock stitch—and the sewing machines to mass produce it—which is what still holds together most of the garments we wear today.

For a small business, Merrow is a complicated one. In addition to manufacturing thousands of different sewing machine parts that are distributed in 65 countries, it also is continually building custom sewing machines for a variety of customers and applications. The high levels of complexity and costs of customization were becoming economically challenging - until Kenandy Cloud ERP entered the picture.

“Kenandy has made it possible for us to deal with all the challenges of a major, multinational company but with the structure of a small business,” says Charlie Merrow. “It’s been an unbelievable change for us—a game change. We’ve been able to improve performance with a small staff, which simply wasn’t possible with our prior ERP systems.”

In addition, Kenandy has given Merrow unprecedented visibility across its business, enabling enhanced efficiency, increased productivity, and better decision-making about current operations as well as future opportunities. “One of the most remarkable things about Kenandy is that it lets us really see what’s going on in our business,” says Merrow. “We have Kenandy running on three 50-inch flat-screens in our big lobby space. Plus, in each department, there's a giant flat-screen with dashboards showing what's going on in that particular area—how many invoices need to go out, for example, or what packages are shipping. We've never had access to information of this breadth and depth before.”

Rather than being constricted by the limitations and unwieldy requirements of their prior on-premise ERP systems, Merrow can use Kenandy to seamlessly leverage information and resources that enable the company to grow and prosper. “Kenandy enables us to focus on the business challenges that allow us to grow and make money rather than on the problems of dealing with software,” says Merrow. “... since we’ve implemented Kenandy, we’ve spent the last year focused on growth. It’s a very different use—a far better use—of our resources, of our people.”

To read more, visit the Kenandy Newsroom.

New Software Research Guides Available Finding that you cannot keep up with all the changes in the latest software? Want to know how the software's features and functions can assist you? Please contact snelson@bswllc.com for more information about these latest editions.

Read our 2016 Mid-Year Supplements. 

Developed through a partnership with Industrial Distribution, Industrial Supply, Contractor Supply Magazine and the Brown Smith Wallace Consulting Group, these 12 page Supplement Guides provide valuable, independently researched information. Each Guide details software company information, identifies vertical markets, highlights functions and technology features, new developments to the software package, shows graphs of the user range, basic entry price point, sales channel (how and where the software is sold), along with company contact information. The Supplement Guides provide everything you need to know when beginning your software selection and evaluation process.

Visit our website to learn more about the Brown Smith Wallace Consulting Group and to use our Software Features Comparison Wizard.