With so much of today’s business taking place online, you need to ensure your technology is helping you thrive and not holding you back. Lisa Veeck talks to dealers using the industry’s leading platforms to let you know what’s out there…
BMI
Office Solutions Products and Services, Yorba Linda, California, has used Business Management Software’s (BMI) Microsoft Dynamic NAV since April 2009.
Bob Mairena, Office Solutions president, explains why his company chose BMI: “Our biggest challenge was that we were using an ERP solution that was no longer keeping up with our needs and was soon to be retired. The lack of support and new development was hindering our growth, efficiency and data analysis capabilities.
“We looked at several software solutions. The decision came down to choosing between a general ERP solution, like Microsoft Dynamic NAV, and an industry-specific solution. BMI is a Microsoft partner specializing in ERP software and the company’s success rate with other implementations across multiple industries impressed us. BMI had also customized the package for the office product space, which at the time was our primary focus. The BMI team also really stood out. Their knowledge of Dynamics NAV allowed us to take advantage of the broad range of functionalities. All these factors played a part in our decision and it’s proven to be a good one.”
Since then, several things have confirmed they made the right call. “The software implementation was almost seamless and came in under budget,” recalls Mairena. “While we played a big part in the success, BMI was right there with us. Working together as a team was the key.”
Favorite features
The software’s user-friendliness is another advantage. “It is a Microsoft product; the user interface and navigation are remarkably similar to Microsoft Office,” explains Mairena. “This allows for quick adoption by new hires and facilitates training.”
But perhaps the most significant benefit has been the software’s effect on Office Solutions’ business. “BMI/Dynamic NAV is such a versatile solution—it has had a direct impact on our operations from day one,” he continues. “It has streamlined workflow for multiple departments, improved our data analytics and built efficiencies across our divisions. Dynamic NAV offers a broad range of functionality that covers various aspects of our business needs, from integrated financials and supply chain management to sales and customer service.”
While Mairena can’t put a dollar amount on how much labor or time BMI/Dynamic NAV has saved, he confirms that while the company has grown, “the headcount has not.” The software has also increased sales, he reports: “I can tell you we have had substantial growth and BMI/Dynamics NAV has played a role in that growth.”
Service and support
Reflecting Office Solutions’ faith in BMI, the company is now embarking on the next stage of its journey with the provider. “We are currently in the process of moving to SaaS [software as a service] platform BMI SupplyAutomate, based on Dynamics 365 Business Central,” says Mairena. “We are excited to see the additional benefits and even more excited that this will be our last big upgrade. SaaS products are hosted remotely and updates and patches to the application or new features are automatically rolled out. The move to the cloud aligns with our company goal of forward-looking technology strategy and continuous improvement.”
Bottom line
Mairena wouldn’t hesitate to recommend BMI to other dealers: “BMI is a great partner—its team is responsive to any issue or need that may arise. The company is committed to being more than just a vendor. BMI is a partner in our success.”
Dealer Commander
Business Equipment, Henderson, Kentucky, has used the Dealer Commander software platform for 12 years. Before the company switched, most of its processes required manual input. Thanks to the Dealer Commander system, the vast majority of these tasks are now seamlessly integrated—and automated.
Favorite features
“All the features are good,” enthuses customer service rep Clint Barber. “We love the system. With a couple of clicks, you can check inventory or send invoices. It streamlines so many processes and the company is constantly making improvements. I especially like how it integrates with our furniture suppliers’ software. It’s really great. You can issue a purchase order (PO) and the Dealer Commander system will send it to the right furniture or office products supplier, automatically checking its stock. You get an immediate response and the order is sent automatically. Before, you had to go to each supplier’s website, check stock and create the PO. It was all manual. Now you can do it all with a push of a button.”
Accounts receivable are also a breeze: “The system integrates seamlessly with QuickBooks. When a customer makes a payment, it goes directly to QuickBooks and the files are updated every 30 minutes.”
Barber goes on to highlight another key advantage: “There is a feature we love which connects to customers’ printers and notifies them when they are low on toner.”
Service and support
According to Barber, the Dealer Commander system is very intuitive: “Like any system, there is a learning curve, but you can get the basics in just a few days.” And the team’s response times? “Really fast. If we have a question or an issue, we submit a ticket and we’ll usually hear back by the next day. They are great about getting back to us.”
Bottom line
“I would definitely recommend Dealer Commander to other dealers,” says Barber. “It is great software and we rarely have issues. When we do, a lot of times, it’s user error.”
ECI
When an independent dealer stays with the same software provider for nearly 25 years, including through countless changes and upgrades, that provider must be doing something right.
Walker’s Office Supplies, Rocklin, California, started using ECI’s DDMS in 1991 and has been with the software provider ever since, transitioning from DDMS and DDMS Plus through Dealer Station to ECI Interactive and today’s EvolutionX.
Favorite features
In addition to its e-commerce functions, Walker’s uses ECI’s Jump Track routing system to keep its nine supply trucks and four furniture trucks headed in the most efficient and accurate direction and provide proof of delivery. President and co-owner Jarrod Anderson also likes the Accelerate analytics tool: “It issues reports such as measuring all sales activity and key performance indicators, producing reports like a daily company scorecard, customer business reviews and usage reports that let us see what customers are ordering or which haven’t ordered in a while. EvolutionX also offers a CRM, but we don’t currently use it.” Anderson also appreciates the system’s seamless integration with other programs, such as HubSpot, which the company uses to send marketing emails.
Service and support
“We pay for premium support and have found that level extremely beneficial,” continues Anderson. “We work with a dedicated team assigned to us and usually get a response the same day or sooner. We are experienced with the system and good with the day-to-day. But there are always two to five projects we are working on at a time to improve our efficiencies. As for customization, ECI has many dealers to make happy and no two dealers are alike. However, since the beginning, DDMS has been built on dealers’ requests and its capabilities are based on dealers’ needs and wants. The company has received a tremendous number of requests over the years. I think if only one dealer wants something, sometimes they have to say no; I know I have asked for some pretty crazy things over the years and sometimes have had to find a manual way, but I am usually able to. When I have a completely new project, they’ll say, ‘Let us think on it for a bit,’ and then they get right on it.
“That’s not to say there haven’t been frustrations at times, but nothing catastrophic that we couldn’t overcome—and part of the reason is we’ve embraced the software,” he continues. “It comes down to the customer. I’m not the best at technology, but I want to keep moving forward and progress, and they’ve been able to do anything I’ve thrown at them, including some pretty crazy things. But we have mutual respect; they are passionate about what they do and know I am passionate about growing my business.”
The bottom line
“We’ve been with ECI since 1981 and have quite a history with the people and a good working relationship with the company,” concludes Anderson. “Based on the product they have, the system’s capabilities and the size of my company, the software suits us and the team have always been able to meet our needs. Technology can be frustrating, but I chose to lean into and embrace ECI’s technology to bring it in-house. It’s helped us with the flow in the warehouse, sales reports and our e-commerce site. It’s all there—a complete system.”
GOPD
The Office BOSS, Truckee, California, had been using another software provider for years. However, as the supplier grew, the service it was receiving felt increasingly impersonal and less flexible.
“When we’d ask for a quote from our previous supplier, the team would give us the runaround,” recalls president Jeff Ridgel. “The company would tell us different people in top management—like the vice president of product development—would call us. Months would go by and we’d hear nothing. And when we finally got the estimate, it would be really high.”
Favorite features
“We are not your typical office products dealer, in that we offer retail shipping services,” says Ridgel. “Between COVID-19 and Amazon, our e-commerce in office products was diminishing, while our retail business was increasing. We are also into several things, including office products, printing and shipping. These three industries have specific software. We needed software that could accommodate our greater focus on retail, integrate the three industries’ software and integrate customer accounts to include both e-commerce and in-person purchases. Despite being with the supplier for years, it was frustrating: all we seemed to get was lip service. It became bureaucratic, had a different agenda and could not accommodate our needs.”
So Ridgel and his team started looking around. They knew they wanted a smaller, more responsive company with less red tape to cut through. GOPD stood out in their research, so in 2020, The Office BOSS switched to its platform.
“The company has been fantastic—much more responsive and accommodating,” enthuses Ridgel. “GOPD was able to add retail and e-commerce account management solutions for us.”
For retail shipping, GOPD developed a program that converts the file format and uploads it to GOPD, which then downloads the file to the proper customer accounts, allowing The Office Boss to send a single invoice no matter when or how an order comes in.
The Office BOSS uses GOPD for its backend account management and e-commerce. “I know the software offers many marketing tools that we currently don’t use,” says Ridgel. “We are limited in what we use, but what we do use is very good.”
Service and support
“We know the people at GOPD by name and the people we talk to have been there a long time and are experienced,” continues Ridgel. “They are fast and responsive. If there’s an issue, we call and say we have a problem and they say, ‘Let’s fix it!’ We work together to find a solution within hours, not weeks or months.”
The bottom line
“I would 100% recommend GOPD,” concludes Ridgel. “We’d never go back to our previous supplier. GOPD is very affordable: two-thirds the price of our previous platform. The GOPD team is responsive and the system is flexible. It’s a win-win.”
Logicblock
Toner Quest, Inc., New York, is big into punchouts—a system that allows customers to access, browse and purchase items without leaving their internal platform. In fact, director of sales and procurement Joshua Fried attributes much of the company’s annual “tens of millions of dollars” in sales to this ability to provide punchouts, which businesses with more than 20 locations most often use. He credits the creation of these seamlessly integrated sites to software provider Logicblock.
Favorite features
But the punchouts are just one of Toner Quest’s favorite Logicblock features. “On the frontend, the customers see the beautiful layout and graphics Logicblock creates for us right on their computers,” explains Fried. “Then they see a catalog that has been customized for them. Some companies set it up so their employees can see just the products pre-approved by the company and their pricing. Other clients allow all products to be shown, but items not on the approved list must be requested to be added. Some companies also set up budgets that either can’t be exceeded or need to be approved if they exceed a certain dollar amount. The punchout works like a retail e-commerce site, where the customer puts a product into a cart and clicks. The order comes to us seamlessly through Logicblock’s system as if it were placed on our website.”
Logicblock’s reporting capabilities are another plus: “Customers can pull a history report at any time that shows them the user, the location and what was purchased, weekly or monthly, whenever they need it.”
Fried says Logicblock’s software integrates seamlessly with its enterprise resource planning software and other third-party programs: “Logicblock spits the order into our system to send an order confirmation and for things like order tracking, we use QuickBooks and Logicblock’s tools to make it much easier.”
Service and support
Technical sophistication and a can-do attitude feature high on Fried’s list of Logicblock benefits: “If we can dream it up, they can build it. I once asked for different colors for each address and the team told me they had never done it, but they could—and they did. I’ve been approached many times by other software manufacturers. I tell them what we currently have with Logicblock and even at 10 times the price, they don’t want to develop those capabilities. Logicblock is innovative and extremely receptive.”
And Logicblock is also budget sensitive. “We have an in-house designer,” says Fried. “We’d develop a design and create a PDF, and Logicblock would create it. If we’d hired a design company, it would have cost $40,000 to $50,000. With Logicblock, it cost us $6,000.”
The bottom line
Fried would recommend Logicblock “a million percent” to other dealers: “I’m not talking to flatter; I’m talking realistically. We’ve met with other software companies and not one offers a system as robust as Logicblock.”
Prima
Complete Office Supply, Indianapolis, Indiana, had used the same software provider since 2005 because it liked the system’s functionality, data updates and service. However, when that company was purchased, Complete Office grew increasingly frustrated by the new owner’s lack of responsiveness.
“The last straw was when the data integration with our QuickBooks became so unwieldy that we knew we needed to switch from QuickBooks desktop to the online version, which was a massive undertaking,” says president Alan Bird. “We had planned to stay with our current supplier, but our QuickBooks was shut down and we couldn’t use it at all. Despite calls and emails, it was three weeks before the company even got back to us.”
So, on October 1, 2023, Complete Office made a soft switch of 25 key customers to Prima and fully adopted the new software by the end of the month. According to Bird, “It’s been great ever since.”
“Prima is the latest and greatest software with the features we need, and we like the ownership and staff,” he explains. “They are extremely quick to respond to our comments, whether good or bad. That’s the kind of partner we were looking for—one that says, ‘If something’s not right, let’s fix it,’ or ‘Let’s see how we can make it better.’”
Favorite features
Bird’s favorite feature of the Prima service is its responsiveness. “Close to that is the software’s ability to automate orders,” he continues. “With our previous software, our staff had to look at and process orders, transferring them to S.P. Richards every day, which meant employees had to stay until 5:00 pm to ensure the customer would get their orders the next day. The Prima system is set to transfer orders automatically. So, for example, on snow days, when employee safety is an issue, they can work from home or leave early and the orders will still get to S.P. Richards and customers will get their orders the next day.”
Bird suggests that perhaps the most significant associated benefit is time: “Automating the orders saves at least 50 percent, maybe more, in staff time. It gives our team far more flexibility and time to pursue client-focused activities and investigate new verticals.”
Complete Office also uses Prima for its e-commerce website. “It’s not me saying this,” Bird clarifies. “We hear from clients that our website is cleaner, faster and more user-friendly. We have had nothing but positive reviews. It also offers more flexibility in what we can do regarding marketing, like offering certain specials and hosting blogs.”
Service and support
The only real challenge Bird recalls during the switch to Prima concerned terminology: “Prima is a European-based company and sometimes the meaning of something would be interpreted differently in Europe versus America. That slowed the transition at the start, but it is not an issue now.”
And if there are any hiccups? “We send an email and don’t have to wait days or weeks to hear back. We get a phone call, not an email, within an hour or less. I can’t stress enough how committed Prima is to ensuring the client experience is a good one.”
The bottom line
“Prima has a doggone good product and the staff do their best to make sure we are happy,” concludes Bird. “I highly recommend the company and the software.”
SSI
Rangel Distributing, Kansas City, Kansas, was looking for software that offered more flexibility and functionality and was more cost-effective than the system it had been using since 1991. The company wanted a software provider that could handle the backend and the e-commerce frontend—especially one that could display commercial cost comparisons.
“We wanted to show our B2B pricing compared to Staples, Office Depot and Amazon,” says president Rick Rangel. “The hardest part for a small dealer is to get the mind share of the end user, to prove we can be cost competitive. We don’t have the advertising dollars the big companies do, so we have to work harder to drive home the fact that we can compete on price. Our previous software only allowed us to show our competitors’ retail pricing, which doesn’t matter a hill of beans, since we are strictly commercial.”
Rangel went on assessing various software options: “Over the years, the costs of the system we were on continued to go up and we were looking at all our operations for ways to cut expenses.” Then, a large customer asked if Rangel could do punchouts. “The software company we were with at the time could do punchouts but hadn’t done many. We were the first dealer in Kansas City to do them.”
One of the software companies on Rangel’s radar was SSI—and he liked what he saw. However, the number of companies requesting punchouts had continued to grow and at the time, SSI had limited experience with punchouts. “Then, about three or four years ago, we met John Evans, SSI’s owner, at a show, and he told us the company now had lots of dealers using punchouts that were working great. This is what we wanted to hear.” So, the company switched to SSI.
Today, an estimated 80 percent of Rangel Distributing’s business is electronic and 40 percent or more comes through punchouts. “We do all kinds of punchouts for different sectors, from manufacturing to healthcare to local governments,” Rangel elaborates. “They are usually for companies with 3,000-plus employees, since the customer’s ERP system has to be compatible and punchouts aren’t cheap.”
Favorite features
Rangel has never regretted the decision to move to SSI: “We are more than happy with the software and it’s a super-reasonable price. No software is perfect, but SSI offers the best combination of everything important to us. Switching was a no-brainer.”
Rangel Distributing uses SSI for both its frontend and backend. Appealing e-commerce features, in addition to its advanced punchout and price comparison capabilities, include a quick search display that allows customers to drill down to a product. “It is easier to narrow the search and provides a much better user experience than showing 400 items customers have to scroll through,” says Rangel. He also highlights SSI’s electronic data interchange functionality on the backend, especially the ability to send invoices electronically.
The system also allows Rangel Distributing to offer coupons, rebates and a loyalty scheme. The company is equally pleased with SSI’s backend accounting program, which produces reports and “has all we need.”
Service and support
Rangel classifies SSI’s customer service and tech support as “phenomenal”: “We email and get a confirmation that the request was received and get a response within the hour. They make sure we get the answers we need. We have never been disappointed. Also, we can set up a meeting with any Fortune 1000 or 500 company and SSI’s IT people and have all the customers’ questions answered. That’s a strong point. It helps us compete by showing we have the same capabilities as Amazon and Staples.”
The bottom line
Would Rangel recommend SSI’s software to other dealers? “The software has great functionality without the high price tag,” he sums up. “It is very reasonable, even for customized programs, further solidifying that we made the right choice. Of course, like any software, it has its quirks; no system is perfect. Our biggest challenge was the learning curve, which there would be for any system we haven’t used before. And some dealers may prefer to stick with what they know. But for us, it’s been fantastic.”
Thalerus Group
United Business Supply, Cleveland, Ohio, was using a software program that was being discontinued and replaced with something that didn’t fit its business needs. The company started reviewing other options and after checking out six or seven different platforms, Thalerus Group emerged as the frontrunner.
“We were a much smaller dealer in 2016,” recalls CEO TJ Monachino. “Right out of the box, the Thalerus platform had most of what we needed—basic things like order takings, pricing and credit card facilities. We had five active users of the system. Since then, we have acquired 22 companies. We now have 20 locations, 140 employees and between 70 and 80 active system users. Now, we really stretch the system. It does our invoicing and pick tickets, separating them by company location. It does it all flawlessly with a click of a button.”
As United Business has continued to grow, so have its needs. “Thalerus has been great,” says Monachino. “Since our first meeting, the company has spent a lot of money investing in the platform, not creating patches but doing actual upgrades. The system is very flexible. The platform is driven by dealers.”
Favorite features
Monachino highlights the search capabilities as a major benefit for customers: “They can search for an item and the system gives them all those products that meet the criteria and pricing and tells them if we have them in stock.”
Customization is another key feature. “The companies we acquired still operate under their respective names,” Monachino explains. “The system will adjust to the right company based on the user login and take them to the branded website.”
United Business also does a lot of punchouts. “We have one that has 2,400 cost centers,” reports Monachino. “They all integrate seamlessly with the EDI system. We get the order into EDI and the system sends the invoice and packing slip; everything is done automatically.”
Monachino also likes how easy the system is to use: “Things like the furniture order entry and quote screens include a basic screen. It’s so easy to train people in an hour.”
Service and support
Meanwhile, Monachino suggests that Thalerus goes above and beyond for clients: “They are very willing to help us grow our business. Janitorial, safety and industrial are categories we had not had before, but they made the system work flawlessly. We contact them and say, ‘This is what we want to do and need.’ Sometimes they will do it for free—especially if they realize other dealers may want it.”
However, they also understand that one piece of software doesn’t work for everyone. Monachino cites an example of a recently requested enhancement: “Before, when we wanted to update a customer list with a new item, we had to create a whole new list. Now, they’ve made it so the list can just be edited.”
And as for the cost? “Very reasonable! When another dealer comes onboard, they almost always realize savings.”
Bottom line
“I would definitely recommend the platform,” concludes Monachino. “The more dealers the better, and the Thalerus team are really good at what they do.”