Epicor BisTrack ideally suited for drywall supply
Dryco managers say there are a number of reasons why Epicor BisTrack is particularly well-suited for suppliers of drywall and related products, including flexibility in inventory descriptors and rebate management.
“You can use different units of measure for your inventory, so that purchasing and AP can enter it in one unit of measure, and you can invoice a customer in another unit of measure,” said Mauro.
Dryco also appreciates the ease with which sales orders are entered and inventory accuracy is maintained making use of Epicor BisTrack kit creation and product tallies to track the different sizes of a parent product. “The staff at our sales desk can quickly enter a drywall order,” said Mauro. “They just enter, for example, three 8s, two 9s, four 10s, and six 12s, and the system pulls the correct inventory SKU and puts separate line items on a ticket for our dispatch to pull. It's really fast, which is important.”
Margin control through rebate management
Rhonda Sandve, controller at Dryco describes how Epicor BisTrack helps Dryco manage their discount and rebate
programs. “It's quite complex, with multiple levels of discounts, pricing plateaus, and rebates that can come monthly, quarterly, or yearly depending on the supplier or the buying group,” said Sandve, adding that knowing the final cost of a product and matching rebate checks to orders is difficult. “To calculate it all manually takes a lot of time and is prone to errors.”
Now, Epicor BisTrack makes it easier to sell product profitably and keep track of expected rebates. The system allows companies to build the anticipated rebate into the cost of the product, with a safety buffer applied if desired, to ensure sales people don't give away the rebate margin. Epicor BisTrack accrues rebates, then calculates expected total for each period which is then cleared when rebate checks arrive. “Our costs and margins are much more accurate month to month,” said Sandve.
Visibility to optimize business decisions
For Sandve, the best part of Epicor BisTrack is the accessibility of sales history and business information across their branches. “It's just huge that we can view data by branch or by product, and use that information to make decisions and look at possibilities.”
“Before, information wasn't consistent across branches and we couldn't rely on it,” said Sandve. “It was time consuming to get reports, and mostly not even worth the time to put it together. Now, BisTrack has so much flexibility and a lot of user-friendly tools. It's helping us manage our business and margins.”
Real-time visibility and the Epicor BisTrack dispatch and delivery capabilities have allowed Dryco to centralize dispatch for four branches. “We have visibility into all the deliveries we're doing in the trading area,” said Mauro. “We can get answers to customers faster, and we arrange to deliver from the closest geographic branch, cutting labor costs, fuel costs and wear and tear on the truck. BisTrack manages the centralized dispatch model for us.”
Time savings and improved accuracy
Dryco managers also cite numerous tasks that take far less time now and are more accurate because of Epicor BisTrack, including generating daily shipments reports, performing inventory counts, and month-end reporting.
Sandve says that reconciling inventory counts is much faster with Epicor BisTrack -stating that product moves quickly in their business, and before using the software delays in count data entry often made it too late to investigate variances. “Now, we're able to count it, run a variance report the same day, and do recounts immediately,” said Sandve.
Mauro describes the time-consuming process previously undergone daily to produce a consolidated daily shipments report, “Our branch managers would manually tally how much gypsum shipped every day. Across all branches, we have close to a hundred deliveries a day. So that's 100 entries of information from the paperwork into an Excel spreadsheet that someone else would then filter and manipulate into a report. Now, with BisTrack, it's completely automatic.”
Sandve also describes a similar process to manually consolidate month-end reports from the various branches into an Excel spreadsheet. “It was open to errors, and took a bit of time,” said Sandve. “Now it's just a press of a button.”