A friend of mine in Chicago owned a small manufacturing and wholesale business that was one of the first Jewish Toy companies. It was a very small business: He ran the Chicago office (2-3 people) responsible for product creation, art, sourcing manufacturing from China, and sales. His twin brother ran the warehouse in Pittsburgh (1-2 people) responsible for receiving and warehousing product, and packing and shipping all orders.
It was actually quite remarkable that they manages to build this business basically just the two of them, with a few other mainly part-time or seasonal employees.
Knowing that I had been out of work for a while, they asked if I’d be interested in helping them in the office during the upcoming busy Chanukah season. Figuring that I had nothing better to do at the time, I agreed.
As a former IT manager, and someone who had been involved with computer systems for many years, I was appalled at what I found — they were using an inventory and sales system that looked to me like it was from 1980! Let me note a few examples:
** Each person’s desktop computer had a COPY of the company database. They were not interconnected or synchronized in any way. Ever morning they would get a copy of the database MAILED to them from Pittsburgh on a CD, and they would each have to update their local database. At best that put them a day or two out-of-date. If one person made a sale, none of the others could see it until the next synchronization!
** Order fulfillment in Pittsburgh (remember these were wholesale orders only) was done by printing out the orders, the using them to pick the products and package them. Once the order was printed, the only way to check status or progress was to find that piece of paper in a huge stack. If a wholesale customer called in for status, or to make a change, we would have to call Pittsburgh, and they would have to rummage through the pile to find the order. Something as simple as getting a delivery date would typically take two days!
In order to run the business, Chicago and Pittsburgh had to be constantly on the phone!I was amazed that they were actually able to keep the business going in such an inefficient manner.
So I quickly embarked on a search for a good inventory and sales fulfillment software package. This wasn’t something that they had even considered — having been convinced (duped) by a sales person at a trade show some years earlier that their system was the best out there for wholesale.
After some investigation I settled on a package called Acctivate (by Alterity). Not only was it very comprehensive, it seamlessly integrated with Quickbooks, which is what they were already using for accounting.
It did take some convincing to get them to agree to purchase both a new server, and this not-cheap software. They were afraid of the change, and neither brother was very technical (to say the least). But I did manage to convince them, and worked quickly to adapt Acctivate to their particular manufacturing and wholesale business needs.
After the slight learning curve, they began to see huge advantages. Tasks that used to take 2-3 days were now 2-3 minutes. Everyone had instant access to all the data in real time, and became much more productive. It was funny — after some months using the new system, they were afraid that their business was failing because they used to have 4 phone lines ringing off the hook and now it was mostly quiet. But the reality was sales and inquiries were being handled so quickly that they were doing more business with much less “busy” work.
So… what began as a simple “come help us do some phone sales during the busy season” progressed into a role as IT manager, as well as sales associate. Normally this would have been very boring to me, but I found ways to make it interesting — like creating valuable reports in Acctivate to help them understand and grow their business, building them a functional wholesales web site and creating the processes to keep it synchronized with their back-end inventory system, and eventually convincing them to abandon their error-prone manual catalog creation in favor of a catalog that I programmed as a report. The catalog creation time went from a couple of months to a few minutes, with all data, images, etc. coming directly from the inventory system, ensuring 100% accuracy. For the first time they had a catalog, website, and back end inventor4y system that were all precisely in sync.
I stayed at that job probably way too long, being that I was getting paid much less than ever before, but I combined it with many of the other activities that are listed in this blog — my photography, teaching in the girls’ high school, and various online business attempts. I take pride in the fact that rather than letting this simple job get me down, I constantly found ways to create interesting and useful projects.
I actually found on the Acctivate web site, an excerpt from a product testimonial that I gave them at some point (although the wording doesn’t sound like what I would have said — someone wrote it after phone interview)
A couple of sample pages from the automatically-generated catalog…
A few snapshots of the JET web site:
