Success Stories

For many years, janitorial and sanitation supplies distributors have considered Activant Stanpak the standard for good data-keeping. And for four years, most of Triad Services Solutions' employees found Stanpak could keep their business in order and give them the information they needed to grow the company.

But there was one exception: President Mike Bondi. For him, wading into Stanpak was like cleaning up a messy room. "I was the one who adapted to Stanpak the least," he said. "I was a little frustrated that I couldn't just go in and click away to work on things. Compared to a Windows-based solution, Stanpak just took more time for me to use."

There was also another, larger problem: Because Stanpak had separate modules for wholesale distribution and repair, Triad's business units could not talk to each other. "If we had someone who bought supplies from us who was also a repair customer, we couldn't look him up in one place," Bondi said.

The Power To Get Things Done Faster

So Bondi kept on the lookout for enterprise solutions that could ease his frustration, visiting vendor booths at ISSA conventions and reading about packages in trade publications. "I had made a point of looking at all of the available products, and nothing jumped out at me to make a switch until I looked at Activant Prophet 21," he said.

Now, seven months after going live with Prophet 21, Bondi and his co-workers at Triad are pleased with the increased flexibility and power it gives them to get things done.

Like obtaining price quotes, for instance. "I've been seeing more of the sales reps doing quotes by themselves on the system, where before, they had to handwrite quotes manually," said Office Manager Lori Todd.

Ease of use makes all the difference, according to Bondi: "Stanpak had a quote system you had to be a programmer to use."

Because Prophet 21 stores all relevant business information in a single SQL database, Triad employees can now track customer relationships across all three divisions of the company. "Our sales reps can now see all their customers and every piece of business they do with us," said Todd.

Goodbye To Third-party Add-ons

It also means that Triad no longer has to rely on third-party add-ons for key functions: "The add-ons could access only a limited amount of data, mostly accounts receivable," said Todd. "The customer service staff could look at customer data but couldn't see everything on one screen. Their ability to do that now has made a big difference."

Bondi and Todd both appreciate Prophet 21's drill-down capabilities, which enable users to do things like look up prices, order status, purchase histories and more on the fly. But perhaps the feature they appreciate most is its processing of data in real time.

"The daily processing is much quicker," said Todd. "For instance, I had to run a third-party billing routine and put its results into Stanpak. Now I don't have to do that anymore, so it saves a lot of my time. I can look up info in two minutes on Prophet 21, where in Stanpak, we had to wait a while."

Maybe the biggest testimonial to how much more productive Prophet 21 has made Triad is the boss' willingness to use it. "I wouldn't open Stanpak for a whole month," Bondi said. "Now, I'm in Prophet 21 every day."

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