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Case Study
Johnstone Supply, The Ware Group, Inc. and MITS Discover® 7.1:
Automated delivery of critical, targeted insights boosts business performance.
Johnstone Supply is the leading cooperative wholesale distributor of brand-name products, expert technical knowledge and superior customer service to the Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning and Refrigeration (HVACR) industry, with more than 340 locally owned and operated stores nationwide.
In Central and Northern Florida, The Ware Group, Inc. owns and manages ten Johnstone Supply locations. The company supports its everyday operations with Activant® Eclipse, a comprehensive Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and business management solution designed specifically for wholesale distributors.
Eclipse is designed and tuned to capture and track real-time operational transactions, creating a rich storehouse of data. To extract maximum value from that data, The Ware Group uses the MITS Discover Business Intelligence (BI) solution, providing critically needed reports and enabling business users to quickly and easily analyze business problems and opportunities. Fully integrated with the Eclipse system, MITS Discover’s Sales and Inventory Analysis "Hypercubes" (specialized data structures optimized for interactive reporting) are used to analyze sales, customer and product data, and have been key to improving pricing and selling practices - as well as margins and the bottom line.
The Ware Group uses MITS Discover to gain valuable insights that aren’t available with a transactional view of the data. "We do a lot of transactions in Eclipse," says Don Livingston, the company’s VP of Finance and IT. "But with MITS we do things that can’t easily be done with standardized reporting - refining our pricing and selling practices, and launching initiatives aimed at improving how our business performs. The flexible reporting and analysis we do with MITS makes those things possible."
The newly-released version, MITS Discover 7.1, will bring an important new capability to The Ware Group: emailing reports directly to report consumers, in a fully automated, unattended fashion. This will make it easy for The Ware Group to put key insights in front of targeted groups automatically, so they can track progress against key goals or new initiatives.
Livingston cites an example: "In this economy, one of our focuses is on bringing in new customers. With MITS Discover, it’s easy for us to set up a customized report and push it out to the marketing and sales people accountable for finding and landing those customers. Our people can see how they’re doing, and make adjustments as needed."
The new report emailing feature will also help The Ware Group break new industry ground in refining some of its internal processes. For example, The Ware Group used MITS Discover’s analytic capabilities to establish benchmark profiles of customer buying behavior - information not generally available anywhere else. Now The Ware Group’s sales opportunity reporting compares actual sales performance against those benchmarks, showing managers and sales reps which customers are buying more (or less) of a product segment than what’s typical.
When a customer’s buying pattern departs from the average, it may mean they’re getting some items from a competitor. MITS Discover automatically delivers these analyses to sales reps, so they can respond with a quick call to the customer - possibly winning more business.
In another reporting "win", The Ware Group analyzes sales data to identify less-than-ideal pricing practices. When their staff overrides the company’s standard price lists, contract or customer-specific prices, profitability can suffer - and a recent round of MITS Discover reporting found price overrides in more than 30% of the company’s invoice line items. Getting this information to the right managers is enabling Ware Group to adjust sales processes, increasing margins by a full percentage point in only three months.
Along with targeted insights like these, the new feature set provides The Ware Group with another advantage. "We have ten locations," explains Livingston. "The sheer volume of reports - multiplied by the number of markets, branches and sales people included in the reports - is tremendous, and getting everything produced and distributed to all the right people and locations takes a lot of time." The automated email feature in version 7.1 lightens the workload on IT staff, and also means that, with faster "insight delivery", key business adjustments and informed decisions happen sooner.
Ware’s staff meets on a monthly basis to discuss and refine sales initiatives and related information needs - and needs are definitely dynamic. "There’s a clear need for IT to respond quickly to those changes in direction. The flexibility that MITS Discover provides helps us achieve that."
According to Livingston, the automated report delivery, together with other new features, will help the company to be more productive and profitable. "MITS Discover lets us see things that otherwise just don’t stand out, and that helps the bottom line. And the new 7.1 version will save us time, and help us do what we’re doing today in a more focused way. That’s a very good thing."
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Company Profile:
Name:
The Ware Group, Inc.
Description:
The Ware Group is the leading HVAC/R Wholesaler in North and Central Florida, USA
Vertical Software Provider:
Activant Eclipse®
Database:
IBM UniVerse®
Web Site:
johnstonewaregroup
| "MITS Discover lets us see things that otherwise just don't stand out, and that helps the bottom line."
| - Don Livingston
VP Finance and IT
The Ware Group, Inc. |
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