Success Stories

To give you an idea just how well Activant Eclipse works for electrical distributors, consider Standard Electric Supply Co. It's been 10 years since the Milwaukee, WI-based electrical distributor adopted Eclipse as its enterprise management solution, and as the company has grown and improved its operations, Eclipse has grown right along with it.

Which is exactly what the company had figured would be the case when it went live with Eclipse in 1998.

"We had been using a product that had been developed by Burroughs [now Unisys] specifically for distribution," said company President Larry Stern. "But the product had been spun off and was being supported by a single individual. It was a good, focused software package, but we realized that we would need a long-term solution, and this package was not going to be the answer."

So Standard Electric spent a year evaluating several of the leading software packages for distributors. "There were five or six different packages we looked at, and at the end of the process, we decided that long-term, Eclipse would best meet our needs," Stern said.

Better Warehouse Management and Customer Service

What sold them on Eclipse was its feature-rich technology. "We were impressed with the leading-edge technologies that were incorporated into that package," Stern said. "In particular, we liked the order entry and warehouse management features. All the features relating to inventory and purchasing were also more powerful than those in the other solutions we looked at.

"On the purchasing and inventory management side, Eclipse has improved our metrics quite a bit," Stern continued. "When we first acquired the system, our inventory turns were under four. Each year since, we have continued to improve that ratio to the point where we now have turns that range around six companywide. That has had a direct financial impact on us."

Eclipse has also allowed Standard Electric to continually improve the level and quality of customer service it offers. Its inventory management capabilities, for instance, let the company offer downstream inventory management services for its customers. "Another feature we are pleased with is Web Order Entry," he said. "We have a significant business focus on industrial customers, and some prefer to use online order entry. We are also able to offer our industrial customers the ability to check the status of deliveries or invoices themselves via the Web thanks to Eclipse."

And it has made the company's warehouse operations more efficient and accurate. "Back when we went live, we were in the 90 percent on-time delivery range, which is typical for many distributors even now," Stern said. "And yet while we increased our turn ratios, we also have dramatically increased our service level to 99 percent on-time delivery" - a level they can achieve thanks in large part to the greater than 99 percent accuracy of warehouse data the company gets from Eclipse's wireless warehouse management solution.

Leading-Edge Technology That Stays Leading-Edge

Stern also appreciates how the Eclipse development team works with distributors to keep the package on the cutting edge and add useful new features to it. "As an industrially focused distributor, we do a lot of kitting," he said. "In order to allocate our costs to qualify for manufacturer rebates, we need to explode out items in the kits with their own costs. We asked Eclipse to develop the capacity to break out individual items in kits to determine exactly how much of each we are selling, and they came through."

As a self-confessed "leading edge user" of Eclipse, Stern said his company has also provided the Eclipse team with a steady stream of advice and suggestions that have made the solution even stronger. "It's part of our business philosophy," he said. "Continuous improvement is ingrained into it, and the same is true for the Eclipse developers."

"I consider Eclipse the best solution for electrical distribution," Stern said. "Activant works hard to stay on the leading edge in technology, and from that standpoint, I am very satisfied with it."

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