DBS Harnesses Business Intelligence to Free Resources and Drive Significant YoY Growth
Family-owned and operated, Dartmouth Building Supply (DBS) has grown into one of the largest independent building materials supply companies in Southeastern Massachusetts. Jason Delgado, Executive Vice President at DBS explained, “My father started this company nearly 40 years ago and my sister and I grew up with it, learning everything from sweeping the shop floor and selling materials to now leading it. Many of our employees have been with us for a long time and have successfully encouraged their family members to join too.”
The company built a reputation for superior-quality materials and true-to-promise service delivery. However, the legacy ERP system could not match the executive team’s ambitions. Delgado elaborated, “We realized that we were quickly outgrowing our proprietary ERP application and about to hit a wall with functionality and scalability.”
Dartmouth Building Supply needed a future-ready solution to embrace its culture of excellence and empower growth. In 2016, the company’s leaders looked at the options. “There are a lot of good ERP platforms around and we evaluated multiple possibilities. We ultimately selected Epicor because the platform clearly had the most to offer,” Delgado recounted.
We have achieved a minimum of 10% per year growth in terms of both expanding our customer base and increasing order size. Epicor BisTrack helped enable that growth and has liberated resources to invest in new equipment. We might have gone off the rails without Epicor, but now we’re able to power ahead, knowing we’re going in the right direction.
In addition to Epicor’s multi-decade track record and accumulated expertise in the building supply industry, a major decision criterion was that the Epicor BisTrack solution was offered in a cloud-based deployment model. According to Delgado, “We are experts in sourcing and delivering quality materials to our customers, but we are not experts in IT. Epicor BisTrack gives us the confidence that we always have the most up-to-date capabilities, and the application is continuously available from anywhere, well-supported, and secure. We can focus on what we do best. Having the certainty of business and operational continuity in the face of any potential disaster also was a very important consideration.”
He continued, “Running our business in the cloud made great financial sense, too. Rather than purchasing all the equipment upfront for a go-live date, the SaaS model allows us to pay as we go.”
With the decision made, DBS embarked on the journey forward. Delgado said, “The implementation was smooth. Project management, technical support, and hosted support were all rock-solid.” Perhaps most significant for a company with such a deep-seated commitment to its employee and business relationships, Delgado added, “The Epicor team has become an extension of our own.”
Delgado pointed out an unexpected benefit of the implementation process: “The exercise of evaluating procedures and systems to define new best practices forced us to look at our business from a different angle, to question if we had been doing it the right way, or the best way. It helped ensure that we implement the most efficient, effective processes that are specifically tailored to hitting our objectives.”
He noted, “Epicor BisTrack also has plenty of checks and balances, and verifies that all of our proposed customizations will be viable. We’ve found that the imposed discipline has yielded tangibly better outcomes.”
Dartmouth Building Supplies’ users – especially those who remember the tab and function-key commands of the old system – appreciate the intuitive Windows-based interface, which accelerates the time to value for new employees or those being trained on the system.
A measure of DBS’ trust in Epicor is reflected in its continual adoption of new functionality and modules by the building supplies company. “Capabilities like Epicor’s AP automation just make good business sense,” shared Delgado. The result is that DBS manages accounts payable with a staff of one, instead of the four people that would have been necessary to manage a similar volume.
The DBS team is in the middle of implementing the Epicor Warehouse Management Solution (WMS). Delgado explained that the catalyst for doing so was two-fold: “We wanted to be able to onboard and have new employees be productive more quickly; in parallel, we needed to eliminate the frustration and lost time associated with inventory issues.”
We are experts in sourcing and delivering quality materials to our customers, but we are not experts in IT. Epicor BisTrack gives us the confidence that we always have the most up-to-date capabilities, and the application is continuously available from anywhere, well-supported, and secure: We can focus on what we do best.
WMS is an application that is easy to learn and navigate, as well as helping eliminate errors and improve productivity. “No more wasting time looking for materials or chasing down returns. We’ll virtually eradicate lost units and the time and resource sink associated with cycle counting,” Delgado noted.
The company also has launched several initiatives facilitated by the Epicor implementation. Delgado shared, “We have a web store project that will provide an enhanced interface for our customers. It will put us on the leading edge of customers’ expectations in terms of accessibility and account management.”
“Epicor gives us everything that we need to help us expand,” Delgado summarized. The business intelligence available to DBS continues to revolutionize the entire company. “Before Epicor, data analysis meant mining reams of paper or wrestling with Excel in an attempt to create something usable. It was tedious, time-intensive and certainly not very timely or actionable. We’re still learning, but now we have the power of real-time insights to make better, more informed strategic decisions to drive success.”
Another significant advantage of Epicor solutions is freeing managers to focus on building the business. “Our leaders were spending too much time in the day-to-day minutiae. With Epicor BisTrack, they have more time to focus on profitable growth,” Delgado cited.
He concluded, “We have achieved a minimum of 10% per year growth in terms of both expanding our customer base and increasing order size. Epicor BisTrack helped enable that growth and has liberated resources to invest in new equipment. We might have gone off the rails without Epicor, but we’re now able to power ahead, knowing we’re going in exactly the right direction.”
