Thursday, September 08, 2011

Leapfrog Technology for The Industrial Distribution Sector

It was Dec 2006 and the entrpreneur team of Ron Shaw, Steve Baker and Taha Raja went to the closing table to purchase an old fashion industry distributor - Fasteners for Metal and Wood, today known as FMW Fasteners.

The objective was to bring modern systems and new capabilities to an old school business.   Lets bring new technology to a traditional business and provide a "new way of doing business".

The thought and the theory was sound, but the question was how?  What technology and what systems would bring the competitive edge?  It took 18 months for our team to figure out the best way to address this challenge. The answer came with Sererra and Netsuite.

In an industry that is dominated by business owners with 30-60 years of experience, entrenched relationships and customer loyalty, it becomes very difficult to compete.  As anewcomers to an old established system, the choice was clear.  Compete in the field created by your competitor well established for 60 years or change the game and the playing field and have them chase you?

With Sererra and CloudTurn (A Sererra initiative using the Power of Netsuite), FMW was able to turn a traditonal brick and mortar business into a true online ecommerce business at a fraction of the cost required to bring similar capabilities using traditional software and systems available in the market space.

FMW vetted out many software providers and none of them provided the ease of deployment, rapid customization, and end to end integrated CRM, Accounting, Inventory Management, Accounting and Ecommerce in one package.  Further it provided the ability to bring unique industry specific capabilties like certification tracking, WMS, lot and serial tracking, and other unique fastener specific needs with rapid platform development capability.

The other challenge to "leapfrog" our competitors was how to do this using a budget that worked?  Endless money could have been spent and most traditional software systems required a perpetual license investment, infrastructure and other soft and hard costs outside of simple licensing.  CloudTurn uses the power of cloud computing which provided a rental - month to month approach to our investment.

CloudTurn provided FMW Fasteners with a professional turn key solution that clearly leap frogged our competitors.  Today we are launching hundreds of new products every month and providing a true low cost supply of quality fasteners through out the USA with the ease of point, click and buy!  Something very few Fastener distributors can offer today.

CloudTurn provides the automation and the ability to increase productivity by multiple folds!  What was before tied down to a brick and mortal location with sales people pounding the pavement with their relationship has now been replaced by Google, Yahoo and Bing as our premiere sales people touching thousands of customers every second!  Now that is reach, potential and a game changer!


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