Douglas Lumber Saves Time and Increases Profitability with Activant
Executive Summary
When customers enter Douglas Lumber, Kitchens & Home Center
in Smithfield, Rhode Island, they have many options to explore the
state-of-the-art design systems, the professionally decorated kitchens
and baths, the Andersen showcase, or the completely outfitted tools
and materials department.
Since 1976, Douglas Lumber has been one of the largest independent contractor
lumberyards in New England. Located in an 85,000-square-foot building on 15 acres,
Douglas Lumber has a strong commitment to technology. In December 2001, the company
migrated from Activant CSD® to Activant Falcon® to better manage inventory and to serve
as a platform for document management.
“We had been a CSD customer since 1994, but we’d grown to the point where it was no
longer meeting our needs,” explains Chris Alves, Douglas Lumber’s IT Manager. “Since
Falcon had its roots in CSD, it was a logical choice.”
Succeeding in the Housing Market Decline
Douglas Lumber faces a serious housing downturn in the northeast and to combat
that tough market, the company looks for opportunities to reduce costs. “Using Activant
solutions, we can contain costs and use technology to increase our efficiency. Even
something simple like training a new employee is just easier with Activant Falcon. It’s
intuitive and very fast to learn. New employees are more quickly productive,” says Chris.
Saving Time and Money with Andersen IQ and 20/20 Interfaces
Kitchens and windows represent a significant percentage of Douglas Lumber’s business and
therefore the company needs to be very efficient in processing those orders. “We use the
Andersen IQ interface, which allows us to electronically transfer information to and from
Andersen, instead of entering orders line-by-line in Falcon and again in the Andersen
system. This allows us to quickly and accurately enter window orders and better serve our
customers. We save 150 hours per month with the IQ interface and improve order accuracy,”
describes Chris. “We use the 20/20 interface for our kitchen orders and it saves us another
200 hours every month.”
Improving Inventory Profitability
Douglas Lumber set up minimum and maximum inventory settings to help
automate inventory management. “By using Falcon settings, we’re not over ordering or under ordering, and have reduced our out-of-stocks. Falcon also enabled us
to decrease the time required for physical inventory by 30 percent,” describes
Chris. “We increased margin on stock items by one percent, increased special order
margin by two percent, increased turns by two, and reduced inventory value by
20 percent.”
Benefiting Customers and the Company
Falcon’s Document Management solution saves Douglas Lumber an immense amount of
space and time. Hundreds of work orders are produced daily, and when a signed work order
comes back to Douglas Lumber from a job site, it has to be filed by customer. “Work orders
now have bar codes and when they come back from delivery, we scan them into the server,
which matches them to the invoices,” explains Chris. “That means we now have a complete
set of documents for each job, and if the customer has a question, we can pull all of the
relevant information up, and print a hardcopy, email or fax it.”
Reporting Highlights Improvement Opportunities
Inventory reporting helps managers see non-productive SKUs and assess whether every
individual SKU is delivering an adequate return to the business. Douglas Lumber uses that
knowledge to remove some lines, while expanding others.
Another powerful set of reports helps Douglas Lumber understand customer profitability.
Douglas Lumber explores the costs of serving remodelers versus new home builders
and residential customers versus commercial customers. “We use Falcon reports to help us differentiate types of customers to see where we have potential growth opportunities, and
where we may not be profitably servicing customers. With this information, we tune our
processes to more efficiently serve our customers and create more profitable relationships,” explains Chris.
“Falcon is a great tool. It has helped us find ways to save our company money and increase
our profitability. Inventory management has improved significantly delivering a better
return. We have productivity gains throughout the company, including closing the books three days faster. Falcon has been critical our recent success,” concludes Chris.
