Global Supply: Growth & Productivity = Profits

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Global Supply, Inc. is a wholesale/distributor of industrial supplies located in Woburn, Massachusetts. The company was established in 1983 and immediately set out to provide a premium servicebased offering that to this day maintains its focus on getting the right product to their customers, at the right time and at the right price.

Broad Product Line

Their core product set includes a wide range of fasteners in all sizes and materials, electrical supplies, air and fluid fittings, abrasives, facilities/MRO supplies and various other related and synergistic industrial parts.

Fanatical Service

Global Supply Representatives dedicate themselves to providing a level of service that allows their customers to focus on growing their businesses, not the procurement of base manufacturing and industrial supplies. This customer-centric approach has spurred consistent and steady growth for GSI throughout its 23 year history. The most dramatic appreciation has occurred over the last six years when the company grew over 50% in sales.

Systems Must Support Growth

During a recent interview, Gregg Aronoff, President, said, “Providing GSI with a systems infrastructure that could support our approach to the marketplace has always been an important facet and challenge for our operation. In the mid 1990s, the company implemented a custom-built software program that was designed to handle specific portions of the Sales Order Entry, Pick/Pack List, Invoicing and basic Inventory control functions of the business. Other portions of GSI’s financial management, including Accounts Payable, P&L and Balance Sheet were handled through basic, off-theshelf accounting package. These very effectively satisfied the particular portions of the functions that they were designed to support. However, as the company continued to grow, it became obvious that a more powerful, comprehensive and cohesive information system would be needed. We had to provide the necessary systems foundation for smart management of a growing business.”

Choosing a System

When GSI set out to find a new system, they established a list of key criteria that any new system would have to satisfy in order to make a worthwhile project. This list included:

• An integrated software suite that provided the ability to manage Sales, Service, Inventory, Cost-ofGoods, P&L, A/P and A/R in a single environment;
• A scalable platform that could not only grow with they business, but actually provide key information that would fuel this growth;
• A commercially available system that could reasonably adjust to any of GSI’s important business practices; and
• A system supported by a reputable company that would always be available to ensure that rain or shine, Global Supply could continue service to their customers.

Gregg stated, “Once we began our initial evaluation process, we quickly found that a key component of our criteria list was simply not available in most software package. This challenge revolves around our established and productive “Right Price” pricing and commission program. This sophisticated system is similar to those used at large, successful companies all over the USA. It is designed to give the customer the correct price based on the salesman’s understanding of their needs, while also compensating the salesperson properly for the expertise that he or she contributes to the equation.”

The Business Edge Is The Only One

Prevalent as this pricing and commission structure is among large companies, GSI’s evaluation process quickly revealed that only one of the many packages that they reviewed could handle this process cleanly and as a standard part of the package. It was The Business Edge by Computer Insights.

Gregg explained, “After determining this critical pricing and commission functionality could be handled seamlessly by The Business Edge, we immediately went on to evaluate its ability to satisfy the other important components of our evaluation criteria. First, was the package an integrated suite? As a growing business we were frustrated at having to manage islands of information in different systems. We were immediately made comfortable by The Business Edge’s ability to handle our entire workflow process, from Sales Order Entry right through Accounts Receivable and Performance Analysis.

A Single System Does It All

“Finally, all of our different data input, processing and reporting requirements throughout the company could be handled by a single system. This provided a key path to consolidating our operational tasks. It also provides easy access in a single environment to key customer, employee and inventory performance metrics. We can now use these to better our service levels and grow the company. This inter-system connectivity is a huge advantage. Also, Computer Insights has the deep knowledge that companies like Global Supply, Inc. need. In order to stay competitive, we needed a system that addressed both of our critical criteria, complete integration and a system that is a tool for growth, not just automation.”

The Company Behind The Business Edge

Gregg went on to say, “While evaluating The Business Edge, we were able to clearly see that the folks at Computer Insights are a very responsive team that understands our business. The relationship between providers of business critical applications and their clients is a dynamic, ongoing process. We were able to speak to other users of their product and we not only established that they were a very reputable company, but we were even able to learn how other companies were using the software to increase the value of their own businesses.”

Doubled Capacity

Global Supply has been growing through working with new customers as well as offering additional products and services to existing customers. They have been able to accomplish these important achievements in an ever-increasingly competitive market. This has been made possible by having the right team members and the right support systems fueling their growth. They recently moved to a new facility that doubled their effective square feet. This will allow them to even further reduce the time it takes to get their customers the products that they need, when they need them. They are continuing to add new resources and team members to the mix and The Business Edge provides them a stable foundation from which to grow their company as they grow in value to their customers.

This article appeared in Distributor’s Link Magazine

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