Informed decisions with intuitive technology
Since 1982 Hartville Hardware has been operating their business with Epicor business management solutions. Known as the largest independently owned hardware store in the United States, Hartville Hardware manages more than 75,000 SKUs. “Over 20 years ago we partnered with Epicor to help us improve our inventory control,” said Howard Miller, owner of Hartville Hardware. “Today, I can definitely say that it was a great decision for our business.” Hartville Hardware averages nearly three times the number of items in stock compared to their competitors. “We buy a lot,” said Miller. “Because we have such a wide variety of products, we need to continuously buy better. Epicor Eagle has been the best tool to give us the information we need to improve our inventory management. By using Eagle, we discovered we were making less money because we were buying everything at warehouse and not drop-shipping directly. With the help of Epicor, we decided to buy less and include drop shipping with the intention of flipping our turns down. We increased our turn rate from 2.1 turns to more than four.”
Reporting delivers insight
Celebrating four decades in business last year, Hartville Hardware wanted to increase overall insight into the newly expanded business. They implemented Epicor Eagle Compass, a robust business intelligence tool, to allow them to better monitor business performance. “Eagle Compass has allowed us to pull a lot of great, business-changing information,” said Jade Liechty, IT manager of Hartville Hardware. “I really enjoy the clear and consistent reports into our business that Compass provides-our management team appreciates the detailed reports that I can instantly deliver. For example, we run a lot of low-margin reports and purchase-orders reports, both of which greatly benefit departmental business decisions that the management team needs to make on a daily basis.”
“It's a powerful tool,” said Liechty. “And I think we've really just scratched the surface of the Compass application. We have been able to 'data mine' at a level we were never able to reach before. In the past, we operated by using RQ reports. We were never really able to deliver an easy-to-understand or detailed RQ report. Now we can analyze the business with different reports that we couldn't get out of a RQ report. Compass seems to be so limitless-you can combine an unending volume of data.”
Seamlessly locating orders
In search of a process to improve their special orders department, Hartville Hardware deployed Epicor Eagle Advanced Special Orders, a module that tracks special orders from creation to delivery. “We implemented Advanced Special Orders simply to help streamline our special order process-making it much more efficient for our customers when they come in for special orders,” said Miller. “Prior to using Advanced Special Orders, it would take up to 15 minutes to find a special order for a customer. Today, it takes our associates at most a minute to locate the order. I think that's a 100% improvement over our previous process and that time savings gives our employees more customer-facing time, as well as opens doors for other important projects.”