

March 2009 Company News \| From the Desk of \| Industry News Special Offer Meet Arthur Wright Just when we thought we'd profiled everyone on the Zerion team, we grew! Arthur Wright joined us from Eclipse this month, so before we move on from our stint of employee profiles, we'd like you to meet him. Residence: Cape Cod, Massachusetts Hometown: Brockton, Massachusetts Position with Zerion: Process Improvement Specialist What did you do before joining Zerion? I've spent the last 15 years working with Eclipse software. What is your specialty at Zerion? My strong points include Purchasing, Pricing and Inventory Management. What is the best place you've traveled to for your job? I have been all over the U.S. while in this industry, but my favorite cities are Fort Lauderdale and San Diego. If there was one place in the world you could visit, where would it be? Ah that’s easy, Australia. What do you like best about your job? I like that while every client seems essentially the same (same industry, same software, common challenges and opportunities), each one is unique. What is your favorite “customer success” story? After 15 years on the job, I have seen so many customers succeed and grow. It's pretty tough to pick one. How do you spend most of your time when you’re not working? When I'm not in airports or planes, I am just glad to be "over the bridge," relaxing at home or with friends. What is a little known, interesting fact about you? I am a twin with a unique birthday. My sister was born just before midnight and I arrived just after. Only one in 10,000 multiple births are on different days. Favorite book or movie and why: I would have to say Silence of the Lambs is my favorite movie. The story and the acting were riveting. In one sentence, describe your philosophy on life and work: For work... know your stuff, show up on time and work hard. For life... live as if it matters and enjoy it without becoming a caricature of yourself. Back to Top When distributors think about ways to increase profits, they usually look first at sales. How can we sell more to existing customers? How can we find new customers? Their second thought often is about operations. How can we reduce costs and overhead? How can we do more with less? I typically don’t see distributors focus first on their product pricing, likely because it’s a tough nut to crack. But here’s some food for thought: a change in the processes used to price products could result in as much as 2 points on your bottom line. I like to compare this situation to going on an Easter egg hunt in a thickly wooded area, as opposed to an Easter egg hunt in a bright, open field. Both will produce results as long as the eggs are there; but, the effort in the open field is likely to be a whole lot more fruitful in much less time. Now don’t get me wrong… I’m an advocate of taking a strategic look at all aspects of your business to see what can be improved upon instead of putting all your eggs in one basket. But when you think about the ROI on pricing optimization as opposed to some of the other options, it certainly is worth serious attention. When commenting on the book, Price for Success: A Practical Guide for Improving Margins in Wholesale Distribution, Jim Robison, President and CEO of Walco International said, "Nothing is more critical to profitability and yet more poorly managed in distribution businesses than pricing." Most distributors I come across look at pricing their products with a very limited view, such as based on their last price, or some common multiplier. It’s like they’re hunting those eggs by walking only in a straight line instead of checking behind and on either side of themselves. Even more concerning is the fact that they have priced product this way for years, rarely going back to clean up their product file or re-evaluate their matrix according to the market. In either case, these companies potentially are losing out on hundreds of thousands of dollars they could have earned if they had been more strategic. This month, we announced a new partnership with epaCUBE, a software provider focused on optimizing gross profit for distributors. We’ve aligned ourselves with them so that we can offer clients a more user friendly way to increase productivity through pricing. Here are just a few of the benefits epaCUBE provides: • Perform "What-If" scenarios, modeling the impact on Gross Profit of vendor cost changes or internal changes in pricing strategies across all your products, customers, sales force, and warehouses; • Consolidate multiple Item Masters into one, even if you don’t rely on consistent Vendor Part Numbers or UPC’s; and, • Synchronize your item data electronically with your vendors and information providers. When we install the epaCUBE software, it first allows us to clean the product file (because bad data can be worse than no data). Then, the distributor can analyze their prices with dashboards and visuals and implement only the changes they SEE will make a positive difference. Those changes then are pushed back into Eclipse as a completely seamless process. With epaCUBE, you can do this on a daily basis, which is essential to reaching the primary goal of each install… finding .5 to 2 points on the bottom line. Though it can take months of work to get a matrix clean and profitable, even in a small distributor this can be a compelling number, and for some customers it can mean as much as $200,000 in additional revenue in as little as a year. I don’t know about you, but I sure would like to find that egg this Easter! To learn more about pricing optimization or our partnership with epaCUBE, contact me. Tony King, Vice President 321.229.1089 Back to Top What’s happening with distribution, software and business? Zerion is committed to being a resource for our clients and friends. In the newsroom on our Web site, we have an RSS feed supplying new articles all the time. We also have some links to industry news. Here are some of the recent articles we found most interesting: Put More IT Spending in Stimulus Plans, Obama Advisor Says Microsoft Sees Growing SaaS Opportunity Among SMBs Easy Ways to Cut IT Costs You May have Overlooked Warehousing and Distribution Center: The cross dock evolves Want more news? Visit us at: www.zeriongroup.com/newsroom/industrynews.html Back to Top Get 20% off a 3-Day Operational Audit ... Do you know if you're being as efficient as possible? Are your employees as productive as they should be? Are you using Eclipse to its fullest potential? Zerion is offering 20% off an operational review that will help you recognize issues and identify solutions. This discount is only is available for newsletter subscribers for a limited time. Contact Tony King (321.229.1089) by April 30 to schedule your audit at the discounted rate. Back to Top	Manual vs. Automated Purchasing Eclipse gives you the ability to manually procure material if your customer needs something ASAP and is willing to pay freight. However, you may not realize this function has a downside if used too often. When you “procure” material the system recognizes this as a “tagged” sale, thus excluding it from the automated Purchasing scheme. If you find yourself procuring the same item all the time, this is because the system is not calculating the material in the buy pattern. In this industry, everyone needed their material yesterday so it is common to use the procure function often; but if the customer can wait, let Purchasing get the items for you through the Suggest PO Queue. Come See Us at the NAED Conference Zerion is attending NAED's National Electrical Leadership Summit in Ft. Lauderdale on May 16-20. If you're planning to attend, we'd like the opportunity to meet with you! Along with two of our partners, DTG and epaCUBE, we'll be giving one-on-one presentations to talk about how we can make your business more productive. To schedule a meeting time, contact Tony King at 321.229.1089. Zerion and epaCUBE Join Forces We recently formed a partnership with epaCUBE, a leading product information solution for distributors. Learn more in our "From the Desk Of" article this month (at left) , or visit epaCUBE's web site. Regional Training Coming Up in Milwaukee The Eclipse Users Group is offering regional training sessions in April that are taught by Zerion consultants. The Milwaukee classes will cover RF and Purchasing on April 15 and April 16 respectively. To see the class schedule or sign-up, UFO members can visit the UFO web site. Learn Receiving Best Practices Next Week! Zerion offers an ongoing schedule of webinar classes to get you up to speed fast. Next week we're offering Inside/Outside Sales and Receiving, and the rest of the month includes Counter Sales, AP, Basic Nav and more. To see the complete schedule or sign-up, visit our web site.

March 2009

Company News | From the Desk of | Industry News

Special Offer

Meet Arthur Wright
Just when we thought we'd profiled everyone on the Zerion team, we grew! Arthur Wright joined us from Eclipse this month, so before we move on from our stint of employee profiles, we'd like you to meet him.

Residence: Cape Cod, Massachusetts
Hometown: Brockton, Massachusetts
Position with Zerion: Process Improvement Specialist

What did you do before joining Zerion?
I've spent the last 15 years working with Eclipse software.

What is your specialty at Zerion?
My strong points include Purchasing, Pricing and Inventory Management.

What is the best place you've traveled to for your job?
I have been all over the U.S. while in this industry, but my favorite cities are Fort Lauderdale and San Diego.

If there was one place in the world you could visit, where would it be?
Ah that’s easy, Australia.

What do you like best about your job?
I like that while every client seems essentially the same (same industry, same software, common challenges and opportunities), each one is unique.

What is your favorite “customer success” story?
After 15 years on the job, I have seen so many customers succeed and grow. It's pretty tough to pick one.

How do you spend most of your time when you’re not working?
When I'm not in airports or planes, I am just glad to be "over the bridge," relaxing at home or with friends.

What is a little known, interesting fact about you?
I am a twin with a unique birthday. My sister was born just before midnight and I arrived just after. Only one in 10,000 multiple births are on different days.

Favorite book or movie and why:
I would have to say Silence of the Lambs is my favorite movie. The story and the acting were riveting.

In one sentence, describe your philosophy on life and work:
For work... know your stuff, show up on time and work hard. For life... live as if it matters and enjoy it without becoming a caricature of yourself.

From the desk of Tony King

When distributors think about ways to increase profits, they usually look first at sales. How can we sell more to existing customers? How can we find new customers? Their second thought often is about operations. How can we reduce costs and overhead? How can we do more with less? I typically don’t see distributors focus first on their product pricing, likely because it’s a tough nut to crack. But here’s some food for thought: a change in the processes used to price products could result in as much as 2 points on your bottom line.

I like to compare this situation to going on an Easter egg hunt in a thickly wooded area, as opposed to an Easter egg hunt in a bright, open field. Both will produce results as long as the eggs are there; but, the effort in the open field is likely to be a whole lot more fruitful in much less time. Easter Eggs Now don’t get me wrong… I’m an advocate of taking a strategic look at all aspects of your business to see what can be improved upon instead of putting all your eggs in one basket. But when you think about the ROI on pricing optimization as opposed to some of the other options, it certainly is worth serious attention.

When commenting on the book, Price for Success: A Practical Guide for Improving Margins in Wholesale Distribution, Jim Robison, President and CEO of Walco International said, "Nothing is more critical to profitability and yet more poorly managed in distribution businesses than pricing." Most distributors I come across look at pricing their products with a very limited view, such as based on their last price, or some common multiplier. It’s like they’re hunting those eggs by walking only in a straight line instead of checking behind and on either side of themselves. Even more concerning is the fact that they have priced product this way for years, rarely going back to clean up their product file or re-evaluate their matrix according to the market. In either case, these companies potentially are losing out on hundreds of thousands of dollars they could have earned if they had been more strategic.

This month, we announced a new partnership with epaCUBE, a software provider focused on optimizing gross profit for distributors. We’ve aligned ourselves with them so that we can offer clients a more user friendly way to increase productivity through pricing. Here are just a few of the benefits epaCUBE provides:

• Perform "What-If" scenarios, modeling the impact on Gross Profit of vendor cost changes or internal changes in pricing strategies across all your products, customers, sales force, and warehouses;
• Consolidate multiple Item Masters into one, even if you don’t rely on consistent Vendor Part Numbers or UPC’s; and,
• Synchronize your item data electronically with your vendors and information providers.

When we install the epaCUBE software, it first allows us to clean the product file (because bad data can be worse than no data). Then, the distributor can analyze their prices with dashboards and visuals and implement only the changes they SEE will make a positive difference. Those changes then are pushed back into Eclipse as a completely seamless process. With epaCUBE, you can do this on a daily basis, which is essential to reaching the primary goal of each install… finding .5 to 2 points on the bottom line. Though it can take months of work to get a matrix clean and profitable, even in a small distributor this can be a compelling number, and for some customers it can mean as much as $200,000 in additional revenue in as little as a year. I don’t know about you, but I sure would like to find that egg this Easter!

To learn more about pricing optimization or our partnership with epaCUBE, contact me.

Tony King, Vice President
321.229.1089

What’s happening with distribution, software and business?
Zerion is committed to being a resource for our clients and friends. In the newsroom on our Web site, we have an RSS feed supplying new articles all the time. We also have some links to industry news. Here are some of the recent articles we found most interesting:

Put More IT Spending in Stimulus Plans, Obama Advisor Says

Microsoft Sees Growing SaaS Opportunity Among SMBs

Easy Ways to Cut IT Costs You May have Overlooked

Warehousing and Distribution Center: The cross dock evolves

Want more news? Visit us at: www.zeriongroup.com/newsroom/industrynews.html

Get 20% off a 3-Day Operational Audit ...
Do you know if you're being as efficient as possible? Are your employees as productive as they should be? Are you using Eclipse to its fullest potential? Zerion is offering 20% off an operational review that will help you recognize issues and identify solutions.

This discount is only is available for newsletter subscribers for a limited time. Contact Tony King (321.229.1089) by April 30 to schedule your audit at the discounted rate.

Manual vs. Automated Purchasing
Eclipse gives you the ability to manually procure material if your customer needs something ASAP and is willing to pay freight. However, you may not realize this function has a downside if used too often. When you “procure” material the system recognizes this as a “tagged” sale, thus excluding it from the automated Purchasing scheme. If you find yourself procuring the same item all the time, this is because the system is not calculating the material in the buy pattern. In this industry, everyone needed their material yesterday so it is common to use the procure function often; but if the customer can wait, let Purchasing get the items for you through the Suggest PO Queue.

Come See Us at the NAED Conference
Zerion is attending NAED's National Electrical Leadership Summit in Ft. Lauderdale on May 16-20. If you're planning to attend, we'd like the opportunity to meet with you! Along with two of our partners, DTG and epaCUBE, we'll be giving one-on-one presentations to talk about how we can make your business more productive. To schedule a meeting time, contact Tony King at 321.229.1089.

Zerion and epaCUBE Join Forces
We recently formed a partnership with epaCUBE, a leading product information solution for distributors. Learn more in our "From the Desk Of" article this month (at left) , or visit epaCUBE's web site.

Regional Training Coming Up in Milwaukee
The Eclipse Users Group is offering regional training sessions in April that are taught by Zerion consultants. Milwaukee on a map The Milwaukee classes will cover RF and Purchasing on April 15 and April 16 respectively. To see the class schedule or sign-up, UFO members can visit the UFO web site.

Learn Receiving Best Practices Next Week!
Zerion offers an ongoing schedule of webinar classes to get you up to speed fast. Next week we're offering Inside/Outside Sales and Receiving, and the rest of the month includes Counter Sales, AP, Basic Nav and more. To see the complete schedule or sign-up, visit our web site.