Australian Regional Wholesalers Improves Business with MomentumPro

Australian Regional Wholesalers (ARW) is one of the largest electrical wholesale groups in Australia. ARW operates as separate divisions, two of Australia’s leading names in electrical, Ideal Electrical Suppliers and John R. Turk. ARW also provides business support services for two other companies. With an annual turnover exceeding 250 million dollars, ARW currently has more than 740 users across ARW’s 94 locations using MomentumPro. 

ARW is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Rexel Group, one of the world’s largest Electrical Distribution companies with gross sales of over 12 billion Australian dollars per annum. ARW divisions supply the Australian domestic housing market, the mining industry and various commercial industries.

Choosing a Solution

According to Gary Houston, Group IT&T Manager, ARW, “When Ideal Electrical Suppliers and John R. Turk were taken over by The Rexel Group we reviewed our systems and ultimately the result was MomentumPro." MomentumPro is an Enterprise Distribution Software solution from Australian-based Markinson Business Solutions Pty Ltd.

"We now have about 740 concurrent users across the four divisions with a total of 94 locations. Ideal Electrical Suppliers has 46 branches; John R. Turk has 41 branches and the two companies we provide business support services for have a total of seven branches. All branches across the four divisions are online using MomentumPro in real-time with the whole system running from a central point in Brisbane," says Houston.

"A great benefit of MomentumPro is the ability to logically segregate the four different divisions on one system. The security aspect of MomentumPro makes it useable for an organisation like ours where you have multiple legal and trading issues," says Houston. MomentumPro allows ARW to operate four separate divisions from a single Progress relational database.

Big Improvements in Stock Management

"The stock management of MomentumPro is very good. We have approximately 100,000 active products and a further quarter of a million products on file in MomentumPro," says Houston.

"MomentumPro was a quantum leap for both Ideal Electrical Suppliers and John R. Turk in terms of stock control. Both divisions had come from using a legacy system and there were some challenges in moving forward. It took our staff some time to get used to having immediate information on slow & fast moving stock and obsolete stock and how to deal with these."

"The legacy systems were also decentralised so each branch had their own view and didn't know what was going on at other branches. MomentumPro allows our staff to look at the stock on hold in their own branch or the stock holdings of any other branch. If a customer comes into a branch and they don't have the item in stock, our staff can do an inquiry in MomentumPro and find every branch with that stock available. Previously they would have to ring the other branches which takes time."

"Being a national organisation with competition the way it is, pricing in one region can be different from pricing in another region. MomentumPro gives us the ability to set up multiple accounts under one parent account for one supplier so that we can regionalise the pricing."

Stocktake Efficiency a Major Benefit

Houston explains, "Stock is our major asset. One of the major benefits of MomentumPro has been in the area of stocktaking. Our reporting requirements with Rexel means that we must have a stocktake result at the end of June. Previously, it used to take in the vicinity of three months for one branch of Ideal Electrical Suppliers or John R. Turk to get a stocktake result; with MomentumPro we are able to achieve this in one or two days. This provides us with the ability to quickly identify where any issues have occurred; and we can back track those issues straight away rather than three months down the track."

"MomentumPro has given us the ability to do a stocktake on all 94 branches within six or seven weekends. We do this every six months so stocktaking has certainly been one of the most recognised benefits of using MomentumPro."

"We also use the automatic re-ordering within MomentumPro. The re-ordering facility allows us to create a purchase order run that suggests order quantities based on the criteria that we have set." MomentumPro has a powerful interactive re-order processing system that allows users to efficiently place orders without tedious reporting and re-entry methods.

MomentumPro Directly Addresses Critical Electrical Wholesale Pricing Issues for ARW

"The customer price structures in MomentumPro are very good. Price schedules allow us to price by product or by a group of products. The system allows us to be very flexible," says Houston. MomentumPro allows ARW to effectively structure, update and monitor pricing levels for their entire organisation, product range and customer base.

Houston explains, "We have around 30,000 active customers between Ideal Electrical Suppliers and John R. Turk alone. MomentumPro has allowed us to improve our customer service. Our staff know what stock is in another location and we have consistent pricing across the customer base. A customer can go into any branch and get the same pricing. It may be a small thing but things like that add up to a lot in terms of providing good customer service."

WebOnline helps to Improve Customer Service

One way ARW is improving customer service is with WebOnline. WebOnline is an advanced e-Commerce solution designed to seamlessly integrate into and extend the functionality of MomentumPro.

According to Houston, "We implemented WebOnline because a Business-to-Customer facility was something we had to provide in order to keep one step ahead of the competition. Customers can look up all the information they need and place orders online 24 hours a day, seven days a week. WebOnline saves them having to contact us by phone all the time, and provides our customers with service outside normal business hours."

"The reliability of both MomentumPro and Progress is good," says Houston. MomentumPro is built on Progress Software, a world-class relational database engine that gives MomentumPro the robustness to handle the heaviest workloads with confidence.

The Result

According to Houston, "MomentumPro has given ARW many benefits from an organisational point of view. We now have a global view of inventory. We have a global view of customers. The business processes in MomentumPro are very good."

"When we first evaluated MomentumPro our reaction was very positive because MomentumPro is a product that is focused on the distribution industry in various sectors; and that is the future focus as well. This allows us to pick up business ideas from other wholesale distributors and gives us the opportunity to contribute as well. We are constantly looking at ways to better our business processes and practices so getting ideas from other people in similar business environments is always beneficial."