Supply sleuths

Distributor salespeople turn to sourcing and quoting software to help them locate out-of-stock products.

by Richard Vurva

Salespeople often become agitated with their procurement departments for not responding quickly to customer requisitions. They don’t realize that buyers must thumb through pages of paper catalogs or navigate cumbersome supplier Web sites to decipher hard-to-understand price matrixes, determine freight costs and uncover minimum order requirements.

To help source out-of-stock products, a growing number of affiliates of National Supply Network (NSN), the industrial supply division of Ace Hardware Corporation, are turning to a new sourcing and quoting software tool. Quote Master is a Windows-based quoting system that delivers timely and accurate quotes to NSN distributors on a wide variety of products. Distributors can load the program on desktop PCs or on laptops for use by field salespeople.

The NSN database contains more than 350,000 products. Some are stocked in 15 Ace Regional Service Centers (RSC), others come from Strategic Vendor Partners (SVPs), master wholesalers such as Lagasse, Production Tool Supply and United American Sales, and the remaining products drop-ship direct from manufacturers.

The program relies on a user-friendly search engine that uses a keyword search. If a salesperson is looking for a cutoff blade, for example, he or she enters “cutting blade” in the search engine and Quote Master locates, say, 40 items. By typing “7-inch” in the description category, the search narrows to 12 vendors, many with photos of the product. Descriptions contained in the database help the salesperson narrow the search to a single item.

In this case, the search revealed the price of a blade in a nearby Ace RSC. The same supplier could drop-ship the product at a five percent discount but required a 10-blade minimum order. The process took just seconds to complete and the salesperson had enough information to make a buying decision. Putting information at a salesperson’s fingertips is one of the biggest benefits of the program, says Dave Cherry, NSN manager of information technology.

“Quote Master allows salespeople to work quickly with their customers. We hope it’s put on every salesperson’s laptop and gets in front of a lot of customers,” he says.

Data on demand
Jim Hofacker, an outside salesman for J&B Fleet Industrial Supply, an MRO distributor in Alliance, Ohio, accesses Quote Master on his laptop on a daily basis. It has dramatically improved his ability to respond more quickly to customer requests.

“I carry my laptop right into my accounts with me. Pretty much anytime anybody’s looking for something other than the stock products we ship out of our warehouse, I’ll sit down with them and use Quote Master,” he says.

The program provides Hofacker the flexibility to change margins on products so he can show the customer’s actual price from his laptop before generating an order. More often, however, Hofacker faxes quotes from his home office.

In the past, it might take three or four days for his company to respond to requests for quotes, since Hofacker is just one of 14 field salespeople submitting requests to the home office.

“This has been a major step up for us. It has allowed me to be considerably more responsive to my customers,” he says.

If a product isn’t available, the system also includes complete contact information on about 1,800 vendors, so Hofacker can call suppliers direct when he needs additional information.

“My sales are up over 20 percent since we joined NSN,” Hofacker says. “I have so much more product available. In the past, I never even quoted a price on a lot of products because we weren’t set up with that supplier.”

At one account, in addition to the fasteners, brass and hydraulic fittings he traditionally sold, Hofacker began supplying the company with hand and power tools, janitorial and first aid supplies. During a recent visit to another account, the customer was logged onto Grainger’s Web site searching for fireproof cabinets. Hofacker recognized the supplier and searched the Quote Master database in his laptop and discovered the same product at a 25 percent discount. It resulted in a sizeable order.

Hofacker says it’s easy to save quotes and access them later if a customer has a question or wants to place another order. When a customer reorders, he simply punches in the customer’s name or account number to retrieve the quote, which reduces his paper files.

Opening doors
Sue Stark of Montague Tool & Supply in Branchville, N.J., uses Quote Master primarily as a sourcing tool for products outside of the company’s normal inventory. Most of the company’s sales come from walk-in customers in search of specialty tools and construction supplies, but Montague also handles several large quarries and government accounts.

“When we have to source a product that we don’t have in the store, it’s the easiest place to look at NSN’s product offering,” she says.

Stark says the company frequently receives requisitions from local quarries in need of large quantities of general merchandise. Before belonging to NSN, Montague would lose those orders to national catalog companies because of the difficulty in locating out-of-stock products.

“It’s been a great tool,” she says. “A lot of times you just wouldn’t quote an item because it would be too difficult or you didn’t have the time. This allows someone to quote a much larger list and be able to source it much easier.”

The ability to respond quickly to requests for quotes or to source hard-to-find items can sometimes mean the difference between getting a job or retaining a customer. At a certain point, if you keep saying no to customers, they’ll look for a new supplier. Quote Master makes it much easier to do that work, Stark says.

For example, a customer in search of a chemical pump recently contacted Montague for help.

“I found it in Quote Master and it was right in the Ace warehouse,” she says. “I typed in a description of the pump and got what I was looking for. Without Quote Master, I probably would have no-quoted the item and we would have lost the order. This company buys six or eight of those pumps a year and we probably have a repeat customer now.”

This article originally appeared in the March 2003 issue of Progressive Distributor. Copyright 2003.

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