Building Smarter, More Efficient, and More Profitable Operations with Agility-enabling ERP
“We encourage every new hire to ask ‘Why?’ If the answer is ‘because we have always done it that way,’ we know we have a problem,” Adam Bartlett, Data Systems Manager at Arnold Lumber Company revealed.
That commitment to continuous improvement and a steadfast pursuit of innovation is crucial to the company’s longevity. From a modest wood lot offering hand-cut logs in 1911, Arnold Lumber Company expanded to four locations providing full-service lumber, building materials and masonry supplies as well as cabinetry, kitchen and bath designs.
Because Epicor provides a guided, standardized, simplified approach, we don’t need people who know the industry. We can hire for personality and gain from a broader set of experiences and backgrounds. It revolutionized our operations.
Smart technology investments helped accelerate growth. Epicor BisTrack hosted in the cloud and Epicor Warehouse Management System (WMS) provided a clear view of the company’s operations and logistics functions and delivered real-time actionable insights, enabling the team to streamline processes, boost productivity, upgrade inventory management and enhance the bottom line.
The operations division at Arnold Lumber recently underwent an enormous overhaul. Bartlett shared, “The operations office was high pressure characterized by constant fire drills. The team was coming in at 5 a.m. and leaving at 8 p.m., day in and day out.”
Epicor BisTrack facilitated what Bartlett called a revolution in the department. “The operations manager moved into an outside sales role, bringing years of experience in sales and operations, to help the company after the unfortunate passing of a long-time employee, and we were forced to resort to looking outside the industry to fill that role,” Bartlett explained.
He continued, “Because Epicor provides a guided, standardized, simplified approach, we don’t need people who know the industry. We can hire for personality and gain from a broader set of experiences and backgrounds. It revolutionized our operations.”
Now, operations run like the proverbial well-oiled machine—no firefighting, no stress, no chaos. In fact, drivers began routinely leaving work at 2 p.m., despite making more deliveries.
Efficiency has increased dramatically, too. Bartlett described, “We used to print everything and had clipboards lining the walls. We would build journeys based on tribal knowledge of how things fit together. But it was all just gut instinct and things would get missed. We'd send somebody out for a credit, and it would never get picked up and we wouldn’t know until the customer called a week later.”
Simply by using Epicor the way it was designed has delivered impressive gains. Sales dollars are up 7% year-over-year. We have reduced overtime by roughly $25,000 and are significantly under budget for payroll—even after the new hires and giving every single employee a raise. These are unheard of numbers.
One of the first things the new operations manager did was to eliminate paper. Now, monitors on the walls display Geotab, which is integrated with BisTrack Journey Planner, giving Arnold Lumber line of sight to where vehicles are in near real time.
Bartlett noted, “A dispatcher who had been with the company for 15 years came in one day and picked up the clipboards and threw them away. A really symbolic moment.”
The move away from paper created a much higher level of business intelligence. Instead of printed reports that are only accurate at the time of printing, Epicor BisTrack dashboards and Smart Views push actionable data to the sales team, giving them live information such as open orders, delivery orders, back orders and purchase orders. With one click, they can drill down into the information. The entire Arnold Lumber team has greater visibility of the end-to-end operations process, enabling more informed decision-making, provided by Epicor BisTrack with data from WMS.
“Simply by using Epicor BisTrack the way it was designed has delivered impressive gains. Sales dollars are up nearly 7% year-over-year from 2021, which was up from 2020,” Bartlett disclosed.
He added, “We are fully staffed, with a driver in every truck and an operator on every forklift. We have reduced overtime by roughly $25,000 and are significantly under budget for payroll. This is even after the new hires and giving every single employee a raise. These are unheard of numbers.”
Inventory management also dramatically improved. Arnold Lumber used to complete a physical inventory at all four locations twice a year, requiring all hands-on deck and the closing of two sites on a Saturday, creating a hefty payroll impact. Even worse, the effort didn’t really pay off. Bartlett acknowledged, “Unfortunately, we ended up with settling on a number we were comfortable writing off. We had some pretty substantial write-offs every year.”
Epicor WMS gave Arnold Lumber perpetual cycle count functionality. That means no more physical inventories, eliminating a considerable resource drain. More importantly, write-offs are a tenth of what they once were.
“WMS gives us confidence in the right product, right place, right quantity, with highly accurate inventory levels,” Bartlett highlighted, “It tracks everything: how many, where it is, who's touched it, who counted it, who received it. We can access the entire history. If we need to pick something, WMS already knows the location as well as where the replenishment stock is.” WMS even enables the team to identify specific product stocking areas that have higher rate of miscounts so they can make changes and validate that the changes were successful in reducing count inaccuracies.
Additionally, the dispatch team gets automatic journey starts and completion events via geofences, and the visibility makes it easier to stage for returning vehicles. Bartlett commented, “We use the BisTrack delivery app to capture notes and images of deliveries and credit notes, as well as customer signatures. Our outside salespeople have access to real-time information via BisTrack Web, and our customers have access to their account information and pricing through our Web Track portal and our Arnold Lumber mobile device app.”
Bartlett summarized, “What Epicor gave us is exceptional flexibility. With the visibility, the data and the efficiencies it delivered, we control the process. The process doesn’t control us.”