OHIO POWER TOOL
Ohio Power Tool turned to SalesPad by Cavallo for streamlining its order management processes, improving inventory management, and creating workflows for every business process.
The Company
Ohio Power Tool is a family-owned and operated business based out of Columbus, Ohio. Since 1983, it’s been hard at work selling, renting, and servicing all major brands of tools. The company started out as a repair shop run by founder Jim Amstutz, but it’s since expanded both its services and employee base.
The Challenge
The company’s motto is, “We can help you find the right tool for the job.” Its slogan expresses the company’s commitment to helping solve its customers’ problems, no matter how challenging.
With that dedication to smart, savvy solutions in mind, Suzanne Amstutz, head of HR at Ohio Power Tool, needed to find the right order-to-cash management system for her employees. The company required a single software solution that would increase efficiency and enable staff members to serve their customers better.
Ohio Power Tool has been a Microsoft Dynamics GP customer since the DOS version. While the team is happy with its performance, usability became an issue as the company experienced growth.
“Dynamics GP is just so cumbersome,” Amstutz said, “and you have to click through so many screens.” The clunky interface was slowing employees down as they worked to quickly process sales orders, which is a boat no company wants to be in.
The Solution
A customer service representative at Dynamics GP suggested Ohio Power Tool look into SalesPad by Cavallo® as a way both to enhance GP and make Ohio Power Tool’s operations easier. After a demo, Ohio Power Tool was quickly sold on what SalesPad could do for them.
“Our business is somewhat complicated because of all the different services we offer,” said Jay Amstutz, President of Ohio Power Tool. He was impressed, though, with how smoothly SalesPad could handle the company’s complex business processes. The team was thrilled at how easy handling phone and online orders became, and they were further impressed by how much they were able to improve their inventory management practices.
Suzanne Amstutz Head of HRSalesPad has helped us a lot with streamlining processes, and with ease of use. It helps our staff access the data they need more quickly. It just makes everything so much easier.
Customer Insights at Their Fingertips
Suzanne Amstutz really likes the customer lookup feature in SalesPad. That instant access to a customer’s transaction history, open sales orders, and other pertinent data has proven invaluable to Ohio Power Tool. Being able to locate related documents quickly for a customer, such as returns associated with an invoice, is another feature that Ohio Power Tool finds very useful as it works to provide the best customer experience possible.
“We have so many different kinds of interactions with our customers,” Suzanne said. “Phone orders, web orders, follow-ups…and everything we need is right there.”
Smoother Warehouse Operations
Before SalesPad, Ohio Power Tool was managing inventory the “old-school way.”
“We’d just put it on the shelf,” Jay said, “and [when we needed it], it would just be there — hopefully. But, of course, it doesn’t always work out that way. Just finding stuff was often a big challenge for us.”
Since implementing SalesPad and pairing it with Inventory Manager, Cavallo’s native barcoding solution, the warehouse at Ohio Power Tool has been given a new lease on life. Tracking inventory has never been easier, and by using features such as multi-bin locations within the warehouse, finding the exact tool or part they need is simple for the warehouse staff.
Inventory Manager has also simplified maintaining accuracy against sales orders. Each order bears a barcode on it, so fulfillment is much more efficient; every warehouse employee knows exactly what inventory is associated with every order simply by scanning the barcode. There’s no fuss or confusion. Orders are picked, packed, and shipped more efficiently.
Flexible Workflows for Every Situation
“We needed different processes for each of our company’s services,” Jay said. “For example, a rental requires a completely different type of transaction from something coming in for warranty work, which are both completely different from a standard online transaction. We needed a solution that could handle all of that.”
Before implementing SalesPad, processing such a variety of tasks required using multiple software applications, took much longer, and was much more complicated for the CSRs handling the transaction. Missing a step when entering information in Ohio Power Tool’s separate payment-processing software could potentially derail the entire transaction — all with a customer waiting on the phone.
By consolidating payment processing and other services into one order-to-cash solution and leveraging SalesPad’s workflow functionality, Ohio Power Tool was able to streamline its order processing.
Suzanne agrees. “SalesPad has helped us a lot with streamlining processes, and with ease of use. It helps our staff access the data they need more quickly. It just makes everything so much easier.”