Five Star Group Makes Customer Impact with POW®

Overview

Five Star Group is the leading supplier of paint and hardware in the Northeast.  Five Star has built a multimillion dollar business by providing outstanding value, service and reliability.  Their customer base is made up of several thousand independent as well as chain hardware retailers.  They offer all of the leading brands as well as their own private label of quality products.

Five Star’s business is driven by their premiere sales-and-service team of 50 people.  These experts work closely with customers to assess their needs and to recommend the right products for them to sell.

Challenge

Serving the customer has changed dramatically.  They have become more selective in which vendors they do business with and are much more demanding.  With over several thousand customers ordering over 25,000 SKU’s, Five Star needed the reliability and flexibility in the way their sales force took and processed orders without delays or mistakes.

Five Star needed to provide their sales representatives access to vast amount of information that will permit them to address all of the customer’s needs and questions.  “There is a real challenge in being able to keep track of each customer; their buying preferences, promotions, prices, and accounts receivable balances,” says Sonny Capizzi, Vice President of Information Services.  “We have unique methods and strategies that give us a competitive advantage and the manual process we were using were creating problems.”

When the company decided to expand into other markets and increase its revenues, it knew it needed better information—better information about its customers and better information about its products.

The company also needed to improve how the sales force was taking and processing orders as well handling the unique requirements of each customer.

To maximize customer service and improve profitability, Five Star realized a remote order entry system for the sales force was crucial to the success of its entire organization.  This prompted Five Star to search for a software solution that would help them keep up with their company’s challenges.  They found it with Ai2.

Solution

Using one of Ai2’s software solutions, Five Star implemented a Pocket Handheld PC system for remote order entry that provided current inventory availability, detailed customer purchase history and more—all designed with a focus on improving sales force productivity. The solution is called Pocket OrderWriter® (POW®).  “One of the reasons we implemented POW® was to make it easy for our sales force to manage the wealth of information needed to work with the customer,” says Capizzi.  “Sales reps can easily get answers to customer questions as well as enter orders by entering the SKU number or by scanning the SKU number.”

The POW® solution enables Five Star to efficiently capture orders from the sales force throughout the day and maintain a complete transaction event history for analysis and reporting.  “Generally it takes a couple of minutes for the sales representative to transmit the orders back to headquarters,” comments Capizzi. “POW® also easily interfaces to our back office software system that is running the rest of our business.”

According to Capizzi, “We are in a position now where we have the capability to handle all of our order entry and processing requirements. Our sales force likes POW® because they can handle all sales activities for all their customers with ease.  And since the solution is so easy to work with, we also have a number of our customer’s enter their own orders with POW®—which makes them very happy.”

“The POW® solution plays a vital role in helping our sales force process all of the remote order entry activities and increase revenue,” concludes Capizzi.  “I am delighted to report POW® has met or exceeded our expectations.  Ai2 has enabled us to meet our business objectives.”