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Success Story
Newtown Office Supply: Making the Most of DDMS
Norman White, Vice President of Newtown Office Supply
- Dealership:
- Newtown Office Supply
- Industries:
- Office Supplies
- Office Furniture
- Janitorial Supplies
- Coffeee & Breakroom Supplies
- Annual Sales:
- $6.5 Million
- Amount of business online:
- 40 percent
- Newtown Uses:
Software for office products dealers
Integrated ecommerce web site
Norman White has been with Newtown Office Supply since 2006, and one of the first things he did when he joined the company was evaluate its business software. Newtown already had a DDMS system, but was using only a fraction of its capabilities.
Norman joined the office supply dealership after a 17-year career with United Stationers, where he heard some complaints against the DDMS system. Norman says, “I had worked with many, many customers who were DDMS customers over the years. And my perception was that people weren’t real happy with DDMS.”
Norman admits that he had a negative perception of DDMS going into the business, but he soon realized that his feelings were based on misinformation.
“As I was doing my due diligence to know what it was that I had, I realized that my opinion was skewed based on people who didn’t know what the system could do. And that was even the case within our organization,” Norman explains. “I found out that DDMS, from a backend standpoint, had the capability to do everything that I wanted done.”
But the discoveries didn’t stop at the backend. There was the matter of the web storefront as well. Newtown had been using Dealer Station and, being a United dealer, Norman felt it was time to make the switch to ECinteractive when Smart Search was released. Currently, www.newtownofficesupply.com uses both Dealer Station and ECinteractive, but anticipates 90 percent of its online sales coming in through ECinteractive within another two months – the number is already around 40 percent.
ECinteractive has helped Newtown Office Supply go head-to-head with the big box stores. Norman says, “It has caught us up to the power channel; and we no longer have the issue of ‘Staples has a better site.’”
Norman says that an improved web storefront is another factor that allowed Newtown to double its sales. “Just in hard numbers, we’ve gone from 15 employees to 20 employees and we doubled our business,” he explains. “Part of that has been that we increased our web business from under 20 percent of sales to 40 percent of sales. And our goal is that by the end of next year [it will] be 60 percent of sales.”
Newtown also utilized business analytics software that works with the DDMS system to quickly and easily produce all of the reports and information needed for month-end, saving a substantial amount of time every month.
A couple of years ago, Norman read an article in a trade publication about DDMS and how most dealers were using less than 20 percent of their DDMS system capabilities. As for Newtown having been one of those dealers, Norman says, “I found that to be very, very much the case.”
Norman emphasizes the importance of the decision to really take advantage of the technology that Newtown already had in place. He says, “Although there were some attractive options and choices, all of them would have cost significantly more than just understanding what we had and using it.”
Newtown also began using the full suite of mobile products from ECi, and immediately saw the savings.
“On the operations side, we started manifesting. We didn’t even do manifesting. We were printing a three-part picking ticket, and we were able to go to a one-part picking ticket by using manifesting. We then took manifesting to the next level when we implemented RoutePerfect, RouteTrak and RouteVision.”
Newtown was also able to double the number of deliveries per driver by using the mobile solutions. “From an operational standpoint, with manifesting and better route planning, we’ve been able to double our business without doubling our staff.”
“We had five drivers, and we were able to double our business without adding anybody. I attribute it just to being more efficient using the technology that we had.”
For Newtown, it’s very clear that DDMS was the right technology all along, and now it is helping the dealership not only remain strong, but grow.
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