Ajacs Die Sales Corporation is an industrial distributor located in Grand Rapids, Michigan, that supplies products to tool and die manufacturers. Founded in 1964, Ajacs has many product lines for distribution, including springs, pins, bushings and pad retainer spools. Between the experience of the staff and the focus on a single industry, Ajacs is able to back their products with a higher level of service than most industrial distributors.

The Need for an Affordable and Flexible Solution

Ajacs’ first computerized accounting system was MS-DOS^®-based and lacked the ability to interface with other programs. And because transactions were posted only once a day, the system was only accurate immediately after the daily posting. To overcome these limitations, Ajacs decided to upgrade to a Windows^®-based accounting system. They evaluated a number of programs, including an accounting program designed specifically for distributors. According to Steve Wierenga, vice president of MIS at Ajacs, this was prohibitively expensive. “Also, it forced you to define your business processes and then stay with them regardless of your customers’ needs. We wanted a flexible program that would allow us to serve our customers based on their needs, not based on some software’s requirements,” he says.

The company chose Microsoft^® Business Solutions–Solomon because it is affordable, it had the needed functionality, and more importantly, it is flexible. “One of the main things we liked about it was the fact that this program was designed to be customized,” Wierenga says. “The open architecture and strong support for industry standards, such as the Visual Basic^® programming language, make this possible. Also, the fact that [the product] is based on Microsoft SQL Server™, which is supported by many other third-party applications, makes it easy to integrate with other applications.”

Customized for Maximum Productivity

Ajacs personnel did many of the customizations themselves using tools provided by Microsoft Business Solutions. For example, they used the Customization Manager module to modify windows—adding fields and deleting fields where necessary to better match their operations. Other in-house customizations were done using Crystal Reports to make the standard reports better suited to Ajacs’ needs. In addition to modifying reports, the Application Server module has been set up to run reports automatically during off-hours.

 

Purchase Order Automation

One customization eliminated the need to prepare purchase orders by enabling the Microsoft Business Solutions system to generate them automatically from sales orders. After Ajacs takes an order from a customer, it purchases the material from vendors and has the items drop-shipped to the customer. Thus, every sales order requires one or more purchase orders, depending on how many vendors’ products are involved.

Previously, purchase orders needed to be consolidated by vendor and were typed by hand. Now, the person taking the order enters the items into the sales order window and simply clicks the “Generate POS” button. A customization called AutoPOg (Auto Purchase Order Generator) automatically creates the necessary purchase orders. AutoPOg was written by Microsoft Business Solutions reselling partner, eGroup, the Technology Solutions division of Echelbarger, Himebaugh, Tamm & Company (EHTC).

Another customization took this concept a step further, minimizing the number of purchase orders generated each day by enabling AutoPOg to generate them in batches. Ajacs has determined that this saves four hours each day.

Improved Cost Analysis

Another customization ensures accurate cost analysis by having the system perform a “cost blowback.” This operation calculates the cost of a sales order automatically. This is important to a distributor that deals with many different vendors and has different discount arrangements with each. “This saves time in gathering the information that is needed for cost analysis, but more importantly it ensures that our profit analysis is accurate, which was the main reason we wanted this customization,” Wierenga says.

Eliminating Errors and Saving Money

The software has been set up to manage all the discounts that Ajacs gives customers. Previously, discount information was tracked on paper, with a different discount schedule for each customer. With more than 1,200 customers, it was often difficult to find the right schedule, and sometimes they missed giving a discount, or one was given that was larger than the company’s markup, eliminating profit from that sale. With Microsoft Business Solutions, the Sales Price window is used to enter discount information and the software assigns the correct discount when the sales order is entered. Wierenga estimates that this saves tens of thousands of dollars per year.

Microsoft Business Solutions has automated a number of processes that previously wasted time and created the possibility for error. As a result, the costs that went into customizing the software were quickly recouped. Since implementing Microsoft Business Solutions, Ajacs has increased efficiency and productivity, positively impacting the bottom line.