When ERP pain reached a breaking point, Epicor BisTrack served as an operational springboard—enhancing customer management and boosting profit margins
Patience is a virtue. Just ask Rick Homola, CFO of Hamlin Building Center. He was ready to modernize on a new ERP platform in 2018, but others in the business weren’t yet sold. Fast forward three years and the company’s legacy ERP was pushed to the brink of effectiveness, with executives ready to regain confidence in operational intelligence, improve customer management, and move from an on-premises instance to the cloud.
Epicor BisTrack to the rescue—described by Hamlin as “the only ERP system up to the task.”
A locally owned company founded in 1992, Hamlin Building Center has two full-service lumberyards and works closely with contractors and homeowners to supply lumber, building materials, and construction services.
The company’s existing ERP platform was struggling to keep up with basic financial and customer needs, stretched to the max by third-party add-ons and employee workarounds. As an example, reconciling customer invoices with payments was far from easy, and reconciling inventory was impossible, leading to discrepancies within the general ledger.
“We wanted to modernize all parts of the business, giving customers mobile access to account information and allowing us to integrate with other applications, such as our drafting and design tools,” Homola explains. “We were ready to move away from siloed processes and bring data together in a cloud environment to boost customer connectivity, sales, and efficiencies.”
Hamlin knew the options were to deploy a new ERP system or build it themselves, and while the company is in the business of building, developing software wasn’t part of the vision. Therefore, Hamlin researched ERP options on the market and concluded BisTrack was the only real contender. Once the decision was made to change, the company’s newly hired CTO conducted another robust technical analysis of ERP solutions and came to the same conclusion.
*Other ERP systems aren’t built like BisTrack. It’s the best system out there and the right one for our business, but I had to be patient and wait for others to feel the pain to create a tipping point,” Homola shares.
The requirement for 24x7 customer account access and payment functionality moved the needle, along with the desire to migrate to the cloud and stay connected to critical ERP data from customer sites. Rick got the answer he’d been waiting for, and the business said “yes” to purchasing BisTrack.
Hamlin Building Center didn’t want the implementation to coincide with the company’s peak season, so they took a longer, more methodical approach, giving employees additional time to become familiar with the system before making the switch.
“The support leading up to the conversion and during the process was excellent, with a high-level of involvement from Epicor remotely and on-site,” adds Homola. “Our sales orders had to be brought over from the old system and our staff worked in tandem with Epicor to make that happen.”
Shortly after the go-live, a large group from Hamlin Building Center attended the Epicor Insights conference for lumber and building suppliers, which validated the company’s decision to choose BisTrack. “During keynotes and workshops, it was clear we’d partnered with a company focused on innovation and who wanted input from customers, like us,” Homola explains. “The engagement increased our confidence in both Epicor and BisTrack.”
The impact of implementing BisTrack is far-reaching, with everyone in the company working in the system. For example, the sales team uses BisTrack to pull together customer quotes. Project managers communicate with customers and schedule product deliveries. Transport drivers take pictures of products to confirm delivery, which are automatically captured and uploaded to BisTrack. And staff within the production facility, where panels and trusses are built, track processes from materials gathering through to the finished product.
Bringing data together within BisTrack gives us a new level of transparency to remove the guesswork from operations,” Homola continues. “We have deeper insight into product margins and the ability to search and find customer quotes and take action right from there, improving sales conversions.
With so much functionality available within BisTrack, Hamlin Building Center made the decision to start simple and then gradually ramp up with hands-on support from Epicor. Dubbed the “BisTrack Guru,” a team member from Epicor returned to the store and was on-site for several days, observing how employees use the platform to make recommendations for expansion. As a result, the company was introduced to additional features and functionality tied to inventory, dispatch, delivery, and customer stratification—using data in new ways to better align resources to the right customers.
With Epicor Warehouse Management, Hamlin Building Center employees have instant visibility into the status of orders and inventory, eliminating manual cross-checks to determine if digital inventory numbers match what is actually in stock. Employees now have at-a-glance information on product locations, down to the warehouse, aisle and bin numbers. As a result, the company has increased inventory tracking accuracy and phased out physical inventory counts—saving precious time.
With BisTrack, Hamlin Building Center has dramatically improved how employees work across Purchasing. The weekly replenishment of orders was previously intensive and time-consuming, eating up several hours of work. With BisTrack, the task is completed in a few minutes and has since been expanded to streamline purchases for commodity products and special buys.
The company used to have one person focused on primary purchasing, another on hardware purchasing, and individual branch managers responsible for supplemental purchasing. Now, the company has consolidated all purchasing to a single individual—with time to spare for other projects.
With BisTrack, we’ve increased margins in project sales by 1.08%, showing the power of bringing automation and data-driven decision-making to the business.
“The time saved by using BisTrack allows our valued employees to contribute to the business in new ways,” Hamlin ends. “And we’ve improved margins in large-project sales by 1.08%, an area where margins are very tight, showing the power of bringing automation and data-driven decision-making to the business.”