Johnstone Supply is the leading cooperative wholesale distributor of brand-name products, expert technical knowledge and superior customer service to the Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning and Refrigeration (HVACR) industry, with more than 340 locally owned and operated stores nationwide.
In Central and Northern Florida, The Ware Group, Inc. owns and manages ten Johnstone Supply locations. The company supports its everyday operations with Activant® Eclipse, a comprehensive Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and business management solution designed specifically for wholesale distributors.
Eclipse is designed and tuned to capture and track real-time operational transactions, creating a rich storehouse of data. To extract maximum value from that data, The Ware Group uses the MITS Discover Business Intelligence (BI) solution, providing critically needed reports and enabling business users to quickly and easily analyze business problems and opportunities. Fully integrated with the Eclipse system, MITS Discover's Sales and Inventory Analysis "Hypercubes" (specialized data structures optimized for interactive reporting) are used to analyze sales, customer and product data, and have been key to improving pricing and selling practices-as well as margins and the bottom line.
The Ware Group uses MITS Discover to gain valuable insights that aren't available with a transactional view of the data. "We do a lot of transactions in Eclipse," says Don Livingston, the company's vice president of finance and IT. "But with MITS we do things that can't easily be done with standardized reporting-refining our pricing and selling practices, and launching initiatives aimed at improving how our business performs. The flexible reporting and analysis we do with MITS makes those things possible."
Read the full case study showcasing the use of MITS Discover here.