Executive Summary:
FLW Wood Products, Inc., has been a leading broker of lumber, specializing in the fencing industry. The company, a family-owned and operated business ships quality lumber directly from lumber mills and designated inventory locations throughout the United States.

Founded in March 1984 , the Princeton, NJ-based company is a recognized leader in the distribution of forest products in carload and truckload quantities. Its customers consist of wholesale/retail lumber yards, wholesale/retail fence companies, wholesale/retail landscape supply yards and industrial manufacturers. The company maintains inventory in several key locations throughout North America to assist its customers with their just-in-time needs. In recent years, the company has expanded its markets beyond the North American borders by importing and exporting a variety of forest products.

By combining lumber knowledge, business integrity and personnel skills, the company's professional lumber traders have the expertise to service the varied and specific requirements of FLW Wood's customers. The company's leading performance is largely dependent on the productivity of its sales and purchasing representatives - working in four different locations - to coordinate orders and inventory.

"FLW Wood Products focuses on developing extraordinary relations and understandings with its mills, which directly allows our traders to service their customers with confidence in any capacity," reports Frank Whittaker, president of FLW Wood Products. " Our mill relationships are an integral part of our success in performing for our customers consistently."

The Challenge:
In 2003, Whittaker realized the relationship between FLW Wood Products sales team and the varied mills they coordinate orders with, could be better enhanced with the investment of customized business technology to automate tasks and streamline order and inventory processes.

"Our system was such that our sales reps had limited real-time financial information on their customers and so they simply accepted all orders, resulting in too many instances of overextension of credit. Orders were hand written on preprinted forms and then input into our previous system. We would review all the documents and verify availability and price manually for each order. Inbound freight costs were manually added to the inventory costs by using a printed sheet of board dimensions and a formula for figuring total board footage," Whittaker reports. " Even though we were working with a computer application, the process was very manual and very paper driven."

The Solution:
Intent with automating the next 20 years of the company's performance, Whittaker began to work with Miles Technologies.

Miles Technologies is a Moorestown, NJ-based firm that prides itself on being a complete solutions provider that provides its clients with a single, tightly integrated system developed by the same team of skilled engineers from end-to-end. This "single source" approach saves Miles Technologies' clients, like FLW Wood Products, time and money they would otherwise spend searching for multiple vendors to provide individual services.

"What really got us started in making a change to a more automated system was our accounting processes," Whittaker recalls. "Our accountant strongly urged us to change the way we were organizing our accounting information."

As part of the customized solution created for FLW Wood Products by Miles Technologies, a Quickbooks package, with Internet applications limiting access to approved company officials, was instituted. Miles Technologies listened to FLW Wood Products and heard the company's need for business software that would allow the company to track order quotations, purchase orders, inventory and accounts with consistency from all satellite locations. Also, unique toolbars allowing FLW Wood traders to more easily give clients information on freight, inventory and other purchase parameters.

Miles Technologies empowered FLW Wood Products with t he capability to view in real-time what the exact current inventory availability and cost is at multiple locations. Instead of placing the order for material in general, with the details to be worked out later or calling the various yards to check availability, FLW could now can see which locations have available quantity and what the cost of material. This customized feature allows FLW to be able to not only tell the customer in real-time the expected delivery date based on available quantity and where it is, but to also choose which location to pull the stock from based on the cost of the material to maximize profit.

Miles Technologies customized solution for FLW also allows them to view the gross profit on each sale in real-time based on the cost of that material at the location they chose, giving the company the ability to manipulate the markup percentage or actual selling price and dynamically watch the net gross for that sale change. The customized solution now allows FLW sales rep s to decide on the selling price with all of this information right at hand, so they know the gross profit for a sale at the time they are providing a quote to the customer. This directly affects the company's profit as well as the sales rep's commission. This prevents the sales rep from quoting a selling price too low based on what the actual cost of the material is at any give time.

Miles Technologies also created commissions reports for FLW Wood Products. Today, the company can run a report for a given date range, for a given sales rep, and view the net sales and gross profit. Some sales reps are paid commission based on specific items sold, so today the company also has the ability to run sales reports on specific items sales, both net sales and gross profit. This gives FLW Wood the ability to generate reports upon which to base commissions for any time frame and sales rep they choose.

In short time, Whittaker saw sharp increases in productivity and efficiency at his company.

"We are in our 20th year, and we are stronger than ever and in a better position than ever to target even stronger performance and growth," Whittaker reports. "As a company, we are more productive and more efficient and better positioned to more effectively handle the needs of our more than 400 customers and 100 active vendors. Also, our accountant is happier with us - and that is always a good thing."