Johnston Companies Dramatically Increases Management Visibility with myOrderPoint

Michael Smith, Director of Operations at Johnston Companies, was facing a problem many industrial distributors confront: how to get control of the quoting process? Prior to implementing myOrderPoint, Michael struggled with the variety of methods being used by Customer Service Representatives (CSRs) to produce quotes. Each rep had their own way of providing information to customers and Michael had no way to analyzing the information.

Johnston Companies is a Missouri-based wholesale industrial distributor with six branches located in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri. They ship product to all regions of the US and have done some shipping to Mexico. Primarily their customers are in the Aviation and Aerospace industries but Johnston have a number of customers in the general manufacturing industry.

Having had personal experience working in the customer service department, Michael understood the difficulties the employees were facing in producing quotes in a streamlined manner. He was concerned that as the Johnston Companies grew, they would experience an ever-increasing problem with quote volume and an inability to retrieve and effectively analyze the sucess of their sales process.

In 2008, the Johnston Companies decided to implement myOrderPoint. Expectations were low due to previous experience with quoting software, but as Michael soon discovered, the myOrderPoint web-based software was not only easy to use; but implementation was much faster than he expected.

Today Michael has the quoting process under control. The real-time retrieval of customer and item information from the backoffice enterprise system has improved information accuracy. Additionally, because of the management tools available with myOrderPoint, Michael is able to perform instant analysis on the business, review recently generated quotes, and take action on those that present the best business opportunity.

One of the major advantages of myOrderPoint is not requiring any software to be installed on each rep's computer since myOrderPoint is 100% Internet-based software. Training the employees was simple according to Michael: "All we did was log into the myOrderPoint site, follow the online training, and start working. It was as simple as that." With the online real-time interface to the ERP system there was no need to jump from system-to-system looking up information. The data is all in one place and it is up-to-date.

In today's business world it is imperative that companies provide superior service to their customers. With myOrderPoint, Johnston Companies is providing an improved quote process for their customers while giving their management staff a better view of where their business is and where it needs to go.