Built For
Murphy Industrial Products
The “Halo Effect”
“It’s the effect that occurs when we are prepared to ship quickly and what it does for our customers in increasing their overall business,” revealed Tim Murphy, owner, and president of Murphy Industrial Products.
Murphy Industrial Products is a wholesale company for lifting, pulling, and tie-down products such as chains, cables, and shackles.
Murphy elaborated on the “halo effect”…
“If you call us and we get your custom-made products, these various links of thousands of different items we sell, and we get your order out the door the same day and have it delivered to you tomorrow, your customer is going to be very impressed by the service.”
“The end result is that customer will continue to come back to you.”
Besides expeditious shipping services and an emphasis on outstanding customer relations, Murphy Industrial Products also credits their successful business model to other factors.
“Our organizational skills and the systems that we have in place have a lot to do with our success,” Murphy said.
Finding the right system
Prior to using Acctivate, Murphy Industrial Products had been managing inventory through QuickBooks.
QuickBooks has it minimums and maximums,” Murphy explained.
Murphy Industrial Products began a search to find a more efficient way to handle their inventory.
“We measure footsteps at our company,” Murphy revealed.
“So when we can find tricks or information that saves us even 10 or 30 seconds, we love it not just because it’s efficient but because it adds value to the customer process and it reduces stress.”
The search led Murphy to Acctivate and a competitor.
I picked Acctivate over the competitor because the competitor was too complicated,” Murphy explained.
“So the nice thing about Acctivate is, they have kept it really simple but it’s not a simple system. It’s an intelligent system.”
Systematic success
Acctivate’s “simple”, yet “intelligent” system has been able to provide Murphy Industrial Products with more capabilities than QuickBooks alone.
Acctivate is a lot faster and it allows us to do things that QuickBooks cannot do,” Murphy said.
For example, products can be searched in Acctivate through many ways, such as use of keywords, lot numbers, alternate product IDs, etc., streamlining the product lookup process.
Acctivate has allowed us to search our products a lot faster because it narrows it down to what you’re looking for in a faster way.”
Innovative inventory management
Acctivate has extensive inventory management capabilities. A few examples of Acctivate’s inventory management features are kitting, landed cost, and product metrics.
I really love how the weights are included on the sales orders,” Murphy said.
“So now you can tell the customer, ‘Well that weighs 657 lbs. Let me get you a freight rate on that quickly.’”
Purchasing power
Acctivate’s powerful purchasing management system is able to easily highlight savings opportunities by showing multiple vendors’ prices for the same product.
When you’re selling 7,000 line items, it’s really nice to know that you can click into the inventory tab of any of these items and get the information you need,” Murphy explained.
“You can see your cost from three different vendors.”
Daily management of purchasing activity is simplified with Acctivate’s Business Alerts, including reorder alerts.
Acctivate lets you know when you need to order things and it has a preferred vendor there for you and you hit a couple of buttons and then you’re done,” Murphy said.
“So we no longer have to turn purchasing into a half-day process – now it’s about a 15 minute process.”
Real-time information = real-time results
One of the many benefits of Acctivate’s Decision Support tools is the ability to access real-time business intelligence with ease, such as average sale per invoice.
In QuickBooks, you would have to go back to the beginning of the year and do it the long way,” Murphy explained.
“Now with Acctivate, I check once or twice a week what our average sale per invoice is as another key performance indicator for how well the business is doing.”
Business information can be customized in Acctivate’s dashboards for each user.
Now with Acctivate, I’ve got a window I can check to see if there are any negatives in the system or if somebody received something twice.”
More information = better profit
Analytics and forecasting makes anticipating trends and identifying opportunities into an easy, reliable process.
Acctivate has given us more control over the process and allowed us to analyze areas where we should be making more money – it’s made us more profitable,” Murphy said.
More visibility
Acctivate provides peace of mind for business owners who may be unable to be at their business in person at all times.
I do everything remotely and Acctivate allows me to see if everybody is doing their job and how many orders are still in queue and what time a guy entered an order,” Murphy described.
Even though Murphy runs his business off-site, Acctivate allows Murphy Industrial Products to maintain smooth business operations.
Acctivate has tightened up the ship. It’s made us better in purchasing and it’s given us a lot more sales order management.”
The right choice
There’s a fear that the CEO or the president has that he could be picking something that makes people upset in his organization – that he picked the wrong software,” Murphy said.
“If he uses Acctivate, as far as I’m concerned, that fear is not a fear because of Acctivate.”
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