Epicor Success Story
Small Adjustments to Inventory Greatly
Improve Sneade’s Customer Satisfaction
Company Facts
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Location: Owings & Lusby, Maryland
Industry: Hardware/Home Centers
Number of Stores: 2
Web site: www.sneades.com
“Epicor makes us sharper. Our stores look fuller.
There’s an appearance to each store now
that we have everything, which builds up the
confidence level of our customers.”
Dave Sneade, President/Owner | Sneade’s Ace Home Center
Success Highlights
Challenges
• Previous process required lot of timeconsuming manual entry
• Frequent overstocks during spring/summer
season and stock outs throughout the year
Solution
• Epicor® Eagle®
• Epicor® Eagle® Inventory Planner™
Benefits
• Ease of making changes and calculating order
points improved twofold
• Adjustments to fluctuating seasonal inventory
seamless with the implementation of
Inventory Planner
• Huge timesaver for the company as a whole
and less customer complaints regarding out
of stock items
Sneade’s Ace Home Center, Inc. is an independently owned retail-lumber business. Sneade’s has two locations, Owings and Lusby, Maryland. The company was
founded in 1975 and has been in a consistent state of growth since. In 1989 the
company purchased the former Owings Lumber and expanded the building to a
14,000 square foot hardware/lumber supply store.
In October 1996 Sneade’s purchased Solomons Home Center, also located in
Maryland, and converted it to Sneade’s Ace Home Center. With the continued
growth of the company, Sneade’s outgrew their 8,000 square foot facility in
Solomons, Maryland. They opened a new 14,000 square foot facility in Lusby,
Maryland in July 2002. In October 2003, they constructed a completely covered
drive-thru lumberyard, which makes their lumber service very unique. This allows
the company to house and serve their valued customers with dry, non-weathered
material.
Flexibility Leads to More Appeal
An Epicor customer for 10 years, Sneade’s Ace Home Center first migrated to
Epicor because of its Windows-based system, flexibility, and appeal to the retail
side of their business. “We initially migrated from the Ace Pace System to Epicor
for various reasons; it was not a Windows based system, so it didn’t allow for a
lot of flexibility, and was very limited,” said Dave Sneade, president and owner of
Sneade’s Ace Home Center. “We were looking for something to do more, and
our existing system was not going to be able to accomplish that. At that time Ace
had just partnered with Epicor [Triad at that time]. Subsequently we had seen the
Epicor® Eagle® demo at a tradeshow—it was head and shoulders above what
we were used to at that point. It was a very easy decision to move over to Eagle,
especially with the partnership that Ace had with Epicor.”
Success Story – Sneade’s Ace Home Center
Sneade’s Ace Home Center is focused on delivering the best for
their customers. As the company has grown over the years, they
have also experienced difficulties keeping their live plant inventory
stocked appropriately. Sneade’s Ace Home Center decided to
implement Epicor® Eagle® Inventory Planner™ in April 2012 to
help them adjust their inventory levels to seasonal changes. “Prior
to implementing Inventory Planner we were in the process of
calculating our order points at least once a week and it was very
time consuming,” said Sneade. “We had to run a different report
for the second, third, and forth week of the month. This didn’t
allow for a lot of flexibility when it came to making changes. This
process was working, but once we saw what Inventory Planner was
capable of, we figured it would be much, much better.”
Seasonal changes are very difficult to adjust to. In March 2012
spring came early on the East Coast, and especially for Sneade’s Ace
Home Center. “We had a difficult time adjusting to the increase of
seasonal business using the existing order point reports that we had
in place,” said Sneade. “Fortunately, as soon as we got on board
with Inventory Planner we were able to use the slide rule to increase
our order points and stock levels by 20% to cover the increase in
business. Having those kinds of pools to pull from just made it so
much easier to adjust inventory when we had that kind of surge.”
The same went for the other side of business, for example when the
Sneade’s Ace Home Center seasonal business started decreasing at
the end of the lawn and garden season. “Seasonal business can
drop off considerably early,” said Sneade. “So when that happens
we can say we don’t need 100% of what we had last year [at that
time], we need 80%. This allows us to adjust our levels of inventory
to get more in line of where we need to be.”
Prior to using Inventory Planner, Sneade’s Ace Home Center relied
on manual tracking and input of inventory. It wasn’t uncommon to
find a product out of stock or too much of one item on the shelves. After the implementation of Inventory Planner, the company has
now been able to more adequately measure and calculate the flow
of their inventory. “Epicor makes us sharper. Our stores look fuller. There’s an appearance to each store now that we have everything,
which builds up the confidence level of our customers.”
“As far as return on investment, it’s hard to put a number on it––
this system has MORE than paid for itself already,” said Sneade. “We are more apt to be in stock on products than we were
before. We have been extremely pleased with Epicor as a whole
that we have added Inventory Planner, as well as Mobile Manager,
Performance Manager, and Pricing Planner – which we are currently
pending implementation. We look forward to what’s to come from
Epicor in the future.”
About Epicor Eagle Inventory Planner
Epicor Eagle® Inventory Planner solution makes it much easier
to keep inventory levels where they’ll do your business the most
good—just enough to avoid stockouts, but not so much that it
drags down profits or wastes space. Taking advantage of the
wide array of data held in the Technology Foundation Pack and
state-of-the art forecasting models, the solution provides you with
significantly improved accuracy in demand forecasting.
Eagle Inventory Planner also brings more precision to a number
of key planning elements— lead times, usage computation, order
points and more. It can even give different weights to specific
time periods to reflect seasonal or other market fluctuations, or
promotions that may have impacted sales. Epicor’s co-op partners
have also provided their input into the best-practice forecast models
to ensure that the models are formulated specifically for their
operations. With Eagle Inventory Planner, it’s easy to synchronize
supply and demand—and that means more sales, at higher margins.
About Epicor Software Corporation
Epicor Software Corporation is a global leader delivering inspired
business software solutions to the manufacturing, distribution,
retail and services industries. With over 40 years of experience
serving small, midmarket and larger enterprises, Epicor has more
than 20,000 customers in over 150 countries. Epicor enterprise
resource planning (ERP), retail management software, supply chain
management (SCM), and human capital management (HCM) enable
companies to drive increased efficiency and improve profitability.
With a history of innovation, industry expertise and passion for
excellence, Epicor provides the single point of accountability that
local, regional and global businesses demand. The Company’s
headquarters are located in Dublin, California, with offices and
affiliates worldwide. For more information, visit www.epicor.com.
Contact us for more information on Epicor Products and Services
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