Keim Lumber Company purchased Activant Eagle™ in 1996 and gradually adopted it throughout their operations. The ability to automate competitive pricing and manage inventory is vastly improved over Keim's previous manual systems. Since implementing the Eagle system, Keim has reduced the time to produce monthly customer statements by about a week. Activant Document Management further improved that process, eliminating the equivalent of nearly one position and saving money by electronically storing, rather than printing, invoices. Sales and inventory reports provide them with the ability to analyze their business, increasing efficiency and delivering results to the bottom-line.
Activant Eagle™ for Windows replaces legacy systems and manual processes
Keim Lumber Company has been operating in Holmes County, Ohio, in the heart of Amish country, for more than 90 years. This single location lumberyard generates more than $50 million in revenue with 240 employees, nearly two-thirds of which are Amish. Keim is adding another 86,000 square feet of retail space which will be open by 2006. In addition to standard lumber products, Keim manufactures moldings and has a door and window shop that stocks the complete line of Andersen Window products.
More than nine years ago, Keim selected Activant Eagle for Windows to replace their legacy accounting system and automate inventory and point-of-sale, both of which had been manual for as long as anyone could remember. The migration to Eagle occurred in stages. Accounting was first, then point-of-sale and lastly inventory. A longer transition was due to the unique Amish workforce, who was initially unfamiliar with computers and technology. After embracing technology solutions, Keim employees now aggressively uses their Eagle system to operate more efficiently and deliver superior customer service.
Accurate inventory management and pricing
Keim now has accessible inventory data and the ability to analyze sales by any combination of SKU, category, customer and time period. Keim offers discounts to wholesale customers based on purchase volume. With easy-to-generate Eagle reports, Keim analyzes customer purchase volumes and offers the appropriate wholesale discount.
"The ability to see inventory levels and sales data is phenomenal!" said Lavern Schlabach, accounting and technology manager, Keim Lumber. "The power of viewing sales by individual item, and groups of items, gives us the ability to analyze our business in ways we just couldn't before."
Advanced Special Orders improves customer service
A lot of Keim's molding, window and door business is special orders. Advanced Special Orders for Windows automates the special order process by linking a special order line items with point-of-sale and buyers' lists. Orders are no longer manually entered into different systems. Instead, Keim buyers have instant access to a list of items they need to purchase. Special order customer service is improved by streamlining the process from order to receipt of goods. Every line item of every special order is automatically tracked through the Eagle system. Keim employees can lookup order status of every line item with a few simple keystrokes and easily answer customers' order status questions.
System tools easily track and update key information
Eagle's Price Import Tools dramatically reduce data re-keying saving time and reducing the possibility of errors. For instance, instead of manually entering price changes from Andersen Windows, Keim simply uploads the Andersen file into Eagle.
Eagle System Audit and Reporting Tools provide Keim with a complete picture of system activity down to transaction and item level detail. A single view displays all changes, additions or deletions to key records and transactions. For instance, it's a snap to see who made a change to a customer's billing address, from which terminal, and on what day and time of day. Similarly, Keim uses the inventory transaction register to analyze changes to quantity-on-hand amounts and drills into items with suspicious ending on-hand values. Armed with this information, Keim's Technology Manager resets records to easily correct errors.
Credit management improved with Document Management and credit card processing
Since Keim implemented Document Management, 1,600 monthly statements are automatically produced and laser printed, saving a lot of time and many employee hours. In addition to the time savings, Keim is getting paid faster as a result of customers receiving their monthly statements sooner.
Eagle integrates credit card processing with point-of-sale. Transactions are processed faster and critical credit card data is stored with the transaction data. Keim's Credit Manager appreciates this difference when researching problems. Instead of reviewing both point-ofsale and credit card processing records, he sees all transaction data in a single document.
"Eagle has dramatically improved our ability to run the business. Throughout our operation from point-of-sale to account collection, Eagle increases our efficiency. We have better data and Eagle reporting is easy-to-use and flexible. It's now easy for us to use data for decision making," said Schlabach.
