J. Gibson McIlvain Company

At J. Gibson McIlvain (JGM), wood is at the heart of operations. In business for more than 200 years, the company continues to take great care in sourcing, grading, and supplying the best quality wood products.

To continue to differentiate in the market and meet customer demand, JGM has evolved from a commodity hardwood distributor to a leader in premium custom millwork, exotic hardwoods, and highly specialized wood products. With this change, the company’s distribution has also evolved, with 50% of products now going to builders, manufacturers, and end-user customers and the remaining to retail and distribution yards.

Shifting to more specialized products added new complexity to the business with inventory milled across multiple locations. Hear from Camden Zacker, VP Finance & Accounting, how JGM turned to Epicor to realign Epicor LumberTrack ERP capabilities with current operations, conducting an extensive platform audit and multi-phase strategic transformation. The result: optimized inventory workflows, powerful data-driven reports, and improved financial clarity and control.

Legacy Business with Modern Challenges

JGM’s business has been shaped over centuries, but the company’s largest shift happened within the last decade. The company pivoted from selling primarily full lumber stacks to retail yards, to serving boatbuilders, manufacturers, and high-end construction customers who rely on precision milling, special cuts, short runs, and highly customized product configurations. Today, approximately half of the company’s sales are milled or modified internally before going out the door to customers.

This evolution introduced new, multi-layered workflows that put LumberTrack—deployed in 2010—to the test. Zacker shares a bit of history.

“When Epicor LumberTrack was implemented, we weren’t doing much milling or complex woodworking. Over the past decade, we’ve completely pivoted. As a result, we regularly split, pick individual pieces, and mill across multiple locations. We needed an ERP system to match who we are today, not who we were 15 years ago.”

We often say, ‘If customers can dream it, we can make it’. Epicor LumberTrack lets us be ultra-flexible with customers, piece picking inventory to match hard-to-meet specifications and out-of-the-box designs.

Plus, as the business evolved, the internal knowledge of LumberTrack at JGM decreased as employees retired or left the company, and informal workarounds were introduced. Small gaps in understanding of the ERP system compounded over time.

“Knowledge was lost over the years. People didn’t understand the difference between descriptors and attributes, so we combined things that never should have been combined. As a result, we made our inventory more complicated than it needed to be, creating challenges as we grew,” Zacker adds.

An Inventory Visibility Crisis

Inventory visibility turned into a pressing operational challenge. Because product structures were outdated and overly combined, JGM wasn’t always able to distinguish between inventory available for sale, inventory reserved for millwork, inventory on order, and inventory being split or processed.

As a result, the JGM sales team relied on a massive, manually built spreadsheet that took a full day to build and was updated twice a week. The report was meant to prevent inventory issues but couldn’t keep pace with JGM’s workflows. For example, raw materials earmarked for production were also showing as available for sale, putting the sales team at risk of selling the same inventory twice.

“This report pulls thousands and thousands of lines every time, including every open purchase order, reserved orders, every millwork job, and every piece of inventory,” Zacker explains. “It takes multiple days each week to produce a snapshot in the spreadsheet and then it was outdated within an hour of completion.”

The Turning Point: A Full LumberTrack Audit

Recognizing the scale of the challenges, JGM reached out to Epicor to conduct a comprehensive audit of LumberTrack to better align the ERP system to current operations. The team came on site to review core LumberTrack functionality, workflows, and reports to improve how the platform was being used.

“The reality was we didn’t know what we didn’t know,” Zacker continues. “The capabilities within LumberTrack were there, we just needed someone to go through the system to help us evolve our deployment to fully support our business.”

JGM was motivated to get inventory in shape before the arrival of new equipment (a stacking/sorting machine), working with to create a game plan of recommended changes and a timeline to check items off the list.

“We literally went down to the studs. We looked at every descriptor and attribute across every product category to determine what made sense, what we should keep, and what needed to be rebuilt correctly,” shares Zacker. “Some descriptors mixed wood species with grades and others combined finished and unfinished materials, making it difficult to track materials through various stages of milling.

Together, Epicor and JGM discovered nearly 100 improvement areas—some small, and some transformational—and created a roadmap for modernization.

Tagging Modernization

In addition to revamping inventory descriptors and attributes, JGM upgraded the company’s warehouse management handheld devices and reconfigured tag categories. Historically, employees manually entered count dates for 1,000 individual product tags. Now, users simply scan items and move on—saving the company hours of work and freeing employees for more value-add activities, such as doing inventory counts for accuracy.

“Even the smallest changes contribute to overall efficiency gains and help make peoples’ jobs easier, which add up to significant process improvements,” Zacker shares.

JGM is also transitioning from third-party tagging system to using LumberTrack-native tagging, and expanding tagging to include milled inventory.

Flexibility to Piece Pick Inventory

One of JGM’s big differentiators is the ability and willingness to pick through items and split inventory—able to fulfill customer requests for a wide range of millwork projects. While the company doesn’t require a minimum on what is sold, sales can be incredibly complicated, totaling up to 100 lines of different types of items for a single builder.

“We often say, ‘If customers can dream it, we can make it’,” adds Zacker. “Epicor LumberTrack let’s us be ultra-flexible with customers, piece picking inventory to match hard-to-meet specifications or out-of-the-box designs.”

New Costing and Business Visibility

JGM also worked closely with Epicor to gain insight into costing and forecasting, helping to build new SRS reports and refine dashboards—data that sales, finance, and operations now rely on daily. According to Zacker, the understanding around financial amounts, costings, and accrual work had been somewhat lost over the last decade, and having Epicor on site to help establish accounting rules and financial account rules has been invaluable.

Data is only as good as how it’s sorted and who can see it. Epicor LumberTrack is flexible and scalable, letting us cut the data any way we want it to uncover sales trends. It’s one of our most valuable tools.

One of the biggest impacts was restructuring sales reporting to provide deeper visibility into performance by state, territory, and customer type. Zacker explains the benefits.

“Data is only as good as how it’s sorted and who can see it. LumberTrack is flexible and scalable, letting us cut the data any way we want it to uncover sales trends. It’s become one of our most valuable tools.”

Current Wins and Future Vision

The modernization of LumberTrack has brought efficiency to processes, reduced manual work, and instilled confidence in data accuracy. LumberTrack is being used by nearly everyone at the company—across the mill, lumberyard, sales, and back-office staff.

The company’s goal is to implement all redesigned product structures, tagging workflows, and reporting improvements to support future equipment and operational capacity. “Our new stacking/sorting equipment will replace a few machine centers and we’re working with Epicor to pull data coming out of that new system into LumberTrack.”

By early 2026, the company expects to operate with:

• Fully integrated tagging across all product types
• Streamlined inventory tracking aligned with complex millwork workflows
• Automated, real-time inventory reporting
• Accurate costing and purchasing visibility 

Zacker sees this as a long-term effort grounded in consistent, incremental improvements. “The Epicor team listens, understands our business, and is committed to making sure LumberTrack will support our continued growth. For us, it’s all about continuous process improvements.”

The company’s partnership with Epicor represents a comprehensive modernization effort rooted in collaboration, and a deep understanding of an evolving business. As a result, the company now has an ERP system in place that helps support growth and deliver exceptional service—well into the next century.