Ace Hardware of Hilton Head

Ace Hardware is the world’s largest retailer-owned hardware cooperative, empowering local entrepreneurs to run independent stores. One of those successful owners is Ron Burke. In 2015, he purchased a local store in “rough” condition and converted it into Ace Hardware of Hilton Head. With Ace’s resources and Epicor Eagle full-feature retail management solution, Burke turned the store around quickly. As the business improved and stabilized, he decided to eventually transition ownership to his employees-turned-partners and began focusing on modernizing operations. His goal was to support greater business insights while increasing efficiency, strengthening the store’s long-term success ahead of his departure. 

The ease of navigation and the logic, which seems to follow the instinct of an average person, not a tech person, is what drew us to Propello.

In 2023, Burke and his business partners were introduced to Epicor Propello. The management functionalities from Eagle, paired with a user-friendly format and detailed reporting, strongly resonated with the team. 

Bold Move with Trusted Partner 

Transitioning to any new solution, let alone being a first adopter of emerging technology, can be risky. Yet Burke felt confident about migration because he was working with a team he knew and trusted. “Epicor came prepared with a game plan and clear purpose,” he recounts. “They had the strategic and tactical direction, so we knew what needed to be done and were able to get it done.” In collaboration with the Hilton Head manager and partner Jordan Garmon, who oversees the tactical side of the business, the Epicor team completed the implementation from Eagle to Propello in just 5 days. 

After Propello was implemented, the Epicor dedicated support team remained close by to assist with occasional troubleshooting. “With any new system, there are going to be glitches, and the way Epicor’s team handled the recovery is exactly how I would have expected,” explains Burke.  

That team continues to help deliver additional business value through process enhancements and system reviews.

When the store experienced months of mismatches between book inventory and systems inventory, Epicor conducted a two-day investigation and determined that the error wasn’t in the system or on the outside accounting side, as Burke initially suspected, but was caused by user error.  

“We didn’t just find the root cause for one of our biggest problems. The level of growth and knowledge we obtained from the two-day session with Epicor was priceless,” he notes. “I can tell Epicor is truly invested in our success.” 

More Productive Day-to-day Work  

Once Propello was implemented, the team noticed that many daily tasks became straightforward and were completed faster. “Propello has made things like adding new products so much easier because it’s so intuitive,” explains Burke. “Now I can bring in any new sales guy and have him up to speed on putting things into the system in less than two hours.” 

Propello’s interface is as intuitive as an Apple device. It’s all very easy. 

As is the case with many retailers who are too small to hire a dedicated IT team, systems management and maintenance fell to the store’s manager and partner, Jordan Garmon, which required more technical heavy lifting with Eagle.  After transitioning to Propello, he was helped to reduce his time managing the system by 50%. 

He redirected that time toward profit-driving activities, such as expanding the commercial side of the business, working closely with the sales team, and strengthening customer relationships. 

Burke has also noticed an inadvertent but positive effect of managers logging in to Propello from home in the evening to get things done. “There are many tedious tasks that require them to be at the desk in the office instead of being on the sales floor,” describes Burke. “The ability and flexibility to get certain things done from home while spending more time with customers has certainly added to our daily efficiencies.” 

Ace Hardware of Hilton Head’s success has not gone unnoticed. A store owner from California, looking for “some magic potion,” reached out about visiting Ron’s store. “The only magic they will find here is a warehouse and a bunch of dedicated sales guys. Except we have Propello in the back, which is probably a little secret sauce that would help them,” says Burke. “I never thought of that before, but it has actually given us somewhat of an edge.” 

Confident Decision-Making 

Because critical business data is now easily accessible, strategic business decisions have become much easier. “All of your product usage information is right there. So, a lot of our product selection analysis now takes seconds instead of minutes or hours.”

With the simple search element in Propello, generating reports is faster and easier than ever. That's exactly what non-technical store owners need.

Previously, the ACE team primarily relied on sales data to drive margin decisions. With Propello, the team conducts daily reviews of profit, gross margin, lines per transaction, and other transactional metrics; they use this data to pinpoint actual problems affecting their margins. “The dashboard in Propello helped us be more proactive, specifically around our margin decisions,” says Burke. “We can now identify potential problems more quickly and resolve them faster, which supports our bottom line.” 

“We are confident in our numbers now. Even to the point where, if something’s off, we look internally to see what we’ve done, because it’s probably not the data. So, I’ll give Propello the credit for bringing us into a new arena where we have more trust in our data and our analytics.”  

Convenient access to higher-quality business insights allowed management to shift their focus from searching for data to strategically utilizing it to drive greater efficiency. “With this data, we can have less inventory on hand, improve inventory turns, make faster decisions about new products, and get rid of old products. There is an overall sense of just having a better pulse on the business because of the analytics,” highlights Burke.  

New Operational Capabilities 

One of the most exciting results of implementing Propello is how it helped enable the Ace Hardware of Hilton Head team to scale operations and execute tasks they had previously avoided due to system complexity and product volume. One such example is mass updates.

With Propello, we can now do things that we could never have done before.

Once an unimaginable process, which, according to Ron, “we never even attempted,” now takes the team only a few minutes to complete. 

The ease of use has encouraged more employees to try new things. One ambitious employee downloaded the entire product book from STIHL into Propello. “As far as getting products into the system, we now have all the global parts, including those that are probably only available in Switzerland,” Burke jokes. “That’s how easy it was for our employee to add thousands of SKUs.” 

The team is excited about the system’s ability to support new advancements in retail technology. “One of the big trends in the retail world right now is electronic price tags. Once we decide to go in that direction, I can see us eventually using the analytics from Propello to adjust prices at the shelf or item level by the minute. These technologies working together with AI would create this new dynamic pricing opportunity that could make the business more efficient and more profitable,” shares Burke. 

The Trusted System of Choice 

Burke’s confidence and satisfaction with Propello and the strong partnership with Epicor extended beyond Ace Hardware of Hilton Head. He recently started a new business and chose Propello as its retail management system. “We spent zero time thinking about the system. We just knew we were going to use Propello,” he says. 

When asked whether Burke had any advice for owners who are hesitant to make the transition to Propello, he said:

As far as waiting for the system to become better, there is really no reason to wait anymore. If you’re ready but worried about setup, don’t. It took us more time to coordinate the meeting with all the relevant players than to get the system up and running at the new store.

Because this business operates differently from the ACE store, he was able to test new features in Propello. “In our new business, we write a lot of quotes directly in the POS system, and once we get a sign-off from the customer, we can immediately take that data and create the PO. This eliminates an extra step in the PO creation process, saving us time. It also eliminates any order confusion and PO errors because the information comes directly from what the customer ordered and paid for.”