Doing Business Smart, Doing it Faster

In 2001, the Industrial Depot set upon a quest for a software solution to power their newly formed company. The principles, Tom Arbeiter and Rich Surges, have a deep understanding of the distribution industry and experience with automated systems at various other businesses.

According to Tom Arbeiter, "We were looking for a system that would handle all aspects of the business, not just the back office or warehouse, but marketing, logistics, and remote sales support." The Industrial Depot had thoroughly evaluated industrial distribution software packages for 9 months before deciding on the Advanced Distribution and Management (ADaM) system from Advanced Business Software. "We decided on ADaM because it was obvious to us that the software was dynamic, keeping up with the latest technology, easy to use and intuitive to train new personnel with."

The Industrial Depot has taken advantage of every aspect of the ADaM system. "We want our software to have a firm grip on every part of our business, and to maintain some sort of control over our daily operations," says Kevin Cassels, marketing manager. "ADaM more than fulfills that request." Not only is the Industrial Depot using the core applications for accounting, inventory management and sales and marketing, but they have also implemented warehouse automation with ADaM Pull-it/Ship-it paperless picking and shipping. ADaM On-Line e-commerce allows the Industrial Depot to provide 'value' to their customers with on-line account status, on-line catalog and on-line shopping cart.

One of the guiding philosophies at The Industrial Depot is that they want their products and services to meet their customers needs, provide solutions to their problems and enable them to reach their aspirations. "Simply running daily operations is not what we look for in software," says Allen Gou, purchasing manager. "We chose ADaM because we felt it would help us grow and mature as a business, and so far it has."

One of the greatest challenges to The Industrial Depot before implementing the new system was to provide an 'information rich' and structured inventory. The Industrial Depot has close to 100,000 inventory items. In order to achieve a 'clean cut over', the Industrial Depot staff carefully created as much information as possible about each item before it was converted into the ADaM Inventory. "Our part numbering system and inventory database was getting out of control before we joined forces with ADaM," says Surges, "and once the system was implemented, we began to have a strong hold on our inventory management."

The Industrial Depot was up and running live with the ADaM system 3 months from the time of their decision. "The ADaM system continues to exceed our expectations", according to Ralph Acosta, account manager. "We continue to discover the depth of features that the system has as we look for ways to improve our business processes."

The Industrial Depot doubled their monthly sales during the first month using the ADaM system. According to Tom Arbeiter, "We are looking at a 70% growth over last year and can attribute most of the growth to the ADaM system." When asked how the ADaM system could have that dramatic an effect in a short time Arbeiter replied, "The ease of use allowed us to process larger orders and more orders in less time. The extension of our information to the outside sales force using ADaM Mobile Sync allowed us to capture orders 'in the field' and process them faster and more accurately."