Perma-Chink Systems, Inc. is the world's largest manufacturer of sealants, stains, finishes, preservatives, and restoration products for log homes. Everything needed to seal, protect, and beautify log homes is delivered directly to the consumer or contractor. Besides headquarters in Redmond, Washington, there are Perma-Chink Systems branch offices/warehouses in Colorado, Minnesota, Montana, and Tennessee as well as a sales office in Maine. The manufacturing facility is located in Knoxville, Tennessee where there is the highest concentration of log home dealers in the United States. There are also numerous factory-trained distributors in Canada and the United States.
The problem:
"Prior to Navision, we had an inefficient software package. Invoicing on a daily basis took 2 to 3 hours here and more time than that in Knoxville. Now with centralized billings and payables it takes 15 minutes," said Terry Hofrichter, West Coast Operations. "We had a duplicate system in Knoxville and the Controller had to consolidate the books. The other outlets wrote sales orders on paper and order entry happened here [at headquarters]."
The solution:
Terry explained that of the three software finalists, "Navision was chosen because it was so much more capable than the others. We knew we'd get our investment back."
Terry took on the large task of building the network among the Perma-Chink Systems offices. He has Navision running on an NT Server with frame relay connections to the branches accessed through Citrix Winframe.
"With one server, all accounting and billing functions are centralized and much more efficient. Our process used to be labor intensive. MASI has helped us through a great deal of learning. People here went to training at MASI and then went to Knoxville to train our people there. MASI has given us good direction and has helped us through all the rocks we've overturned on the way!" Terry added.
Randy Adamson, Perma-Chink Systems Controller, added, "MASI is very responsive. The system doesn't require much maintenance, we're into fine tuning now," said Randy. He has been taking object designer classes and he does most of the report changes in-house.
Navision accommodates multiple companies. By setting up department codes to equal store locations, Perma-Chink Systems and Stuc-O-Flex International (a spin-off) can easily see the margins that each store generates. By maintaining standardized charts of accounts for the companies, it's easy to consolidate, explained Randy.
"Sales have increased $10,000 a month because of our website [www.permachink.com]," said Randy. They enter new leads from their website into Navision Contact Manager, and invite log home owners to seminars.
"Microsoft really works well with the new version of Navision," commented Randy. "We cut and paste from Navision into Access or Excel. We also mail merge into Word from Contact Manager."
Randy has utilized shared folders in Outlook to ease his workload. Navision manuals in PDF format are in shared folders so all employees can use them on the Intranet. He keeps new employee forms and documents in shared folders which are also accessible on the Intranet. Before this, he had to distribute hard copies to each branch every time a change was made to a document.
Customer service has improved by being able to double click on the icon next to the package tracking number in Navision and having it go directly to the UPS website and start tracking the package.
"It's been fun to learn this software. I like the flexibility of using the Navigator and Filters-I can dig out any information! Navision is the most powerful relational database I've used and the fastest," concluded Randy.