Built For
Protac
Consumer attention is often gained with graphics on store windows, the floor or products. The quality of those graphics — the pop of the color and durability — starts with the source.
That’s where Protac comes in. They are at the forefront of quality with the single largest product line of pressure sensitive and specialty products that meet the needs of today’s sheet fed offset printers. Their paper stocks, which are primarily large sheet products made of sticker material (adhesive and static cling) support technological advances in the printing process from the evolution of ink resin and more.
“Protac was incorporated in Minnesota in 1992. My husband, Joseph Genosky, the owner of the business worked for a couple of paper merchants prior to that and he felt like he could do a better job of getting the product out to customers.
We sell to a paper merchant, who in turn sells to a printer, who in turn sells to the end-user,” Pam Genosky, Operations Manager said.
Since Protac’s conception, they have built a foundation that has given rise to a superior customer service force in a niche market.
“Our success comes from our willingness to go the extra mile to help customers — being able to help the customer find the products that they’re looking for and being able to answer their questions.
We contract manufacture. We listen to our customers and present the actual manufacturer with the facestocks, adhesives and liners we need and work with the manufacturer to get the end product together.”
A larger program was overkill
Before Acctivate, we were using Great Plains software and that included the actual accounting part of it and the inventory part of it. To me it was not easy to use and not real cost-effective.
It was a bigger program than what we thought we needed. Great Plains was just bulky. It did what we needed it to do, but it wasn’t making it easy for us to do what we do.
We are absolutely inventory driven, so we needed to handle inventory and accounting. We started to look for something especially on the accounting end of it that was user-friendly,” Pam Genosky explained.
To ease up the accounting side of their business, Protac chose QuickBooks and on the inventory side they integrated Acctivate with QuickBooks.
“QuickBooks is very user-friendly. When we switched over I didn’t have any training in it whatsoever. When we put the whole program together nobody realized that I hadn’t ever run the program before — I basically self-learned QuickBooks.”
Protac also gained the needed user friendliness in their inventory operations with Acctivate.
It’s easy to get in and find products or customers in Acctivate. I like the fact that there’s multiple ways to look up orders, like by the customer name or order number.
Also, managing sales orders in Acctivate is easy — the ease to be able to enter them and find past orders. Basically once you setup a product all of your information is there for the next time.
Purchase orders in Acctivate are also easy. You can go back through an item and see what the last purchase order was, when it was ordered and what you paid for it last.”
Needs met with Acctivate
Acctivate has absolutely done everything that we’ve wanted it to do.”
For instance Acctivate’s Assembly functionality helped Protac solve a problem they faced prior to Acctivate that was specific to their business model.
We have to put together some component pieces, for instance we may buy the paper stock from one manufacturer, we’ll buy the adhesive from another and we’ll buy the liner from another. That was our biggest issue before Acctivate — trying to get all those pieces to fit together, so we could sell it to our customers as one final product.”
Protac has six employees using Acctivate and they are all in sync with the real-time visibility the system provides.
We know when checking inventory whether it’s in stock or it’s not in stock. We’ve had multiple times where orders have crossed over — one of our customer reps will get a phone call for a product and then someone else will get one for that product also — well as soon as it’s put into the system it shows as allocated. That’s worked fantastic for us.”
Acctivate’s reports also provide significant visibility to Protac.
We use the standard reports in Acctivate because we’ve been able to get the information we need from those. None of us are real computer savvy to figure out how to run special reports.
We’re able to see the total sales for the month and then break it down by customers. It allows us to be able to compare from previous years where our business and our customers’ business is for the year.
If we didn’t have Acctivate’s reports, as far as budgeting goes, it would be non-existent.”
Acctivate reports provide proven time savings for Protac.
The ease of being able to find what we need in any given Acctivate report saves us time. Say all of a sudden someone says, “I did this last year, can you find it?” Before we’d have to dig through paperwork to find what we were looking for, but now with a report in Acctivate we’ve been able to find that without spending half an hour or 45 minutes trying to look through paperwork.”
When a larger system proved to be too cumbersome for their operations, Acctivate brought Protac the user friendliness they needed to operate more efficiently and successfully. As Acctivate has given Protac proven results, Pam Genosky sees it helping other distribution businesses and based on their experience would recommend it.
I’d tell someone interested in Acctivate: don’t hesitate, just go ahead and dive in.”
Call us at 817-870-1311