From Chaos to Cohesion: ERP Transition Ignites a Smart, Scalable, & Successful Transformation

Customer Profile Founded in 1953, Dickman Supply is West Central Ohio’s family-owned resource for electrical, industrial, and energy-efficient products and services. The multi-location warehouse distributor stocks hundreds of brands and offers custom services including training, labor-saving paralleling, and overhead reduction initiatives. With the owner getting ready to retire and the business getting passed down to his three sons, leadership set out to find an integrated solution to set Dickman Supply up for future success. According to Mike LaPlante, Dickman Supply’s IT Director, the business identified the need to transition to a system that provided accurate and detailed data at any minute of the day to support fast business decision-making. In addition, the software needed to handle large amounts of product imports which were somewhat of a nuance for the distributor.

“It became apparent that our legacy software and communications to our remote warehouses created a gap in the business. We realized that we needed to keep up with the latest tools to support stronger reporting.”

Dickman’s Julie Reck adds “what initially made us begin to consider an upgrade was the aging hardware and the fact we had to rely on one team member’s skill set for upgrade.” Reck also explained that the outdated software made it a very lengthy process to pull data at the end of each month, costing the company valuable time and money.
Navigating the Journey “We looked at a lot of other ERP Software providers, but we were never happy with their databases,” explains LaPlante. As the company’s IT expert, LaPlante commonly found himself writing programs and supplementary code to help unify information to get the most accurate view of operations possible given their disconnected data. “Ensuring the software utilized an SQL database was a key factor in what we were going to do for the future,” adds LaPlante.

“Being able to talk to the database or generate some additional reports because I work with SQL is what helped push Dickman Supply to decide on Savance.”

Savance’s deep industry knowledge surfaced to the forefront during the evaluation process. “Savance had a reputation in the industry for fantastic customer support and they weren’t looking to provide a product outside of their scope,” says Reck. “Savance focused on and specialized in distribution. We felt they had a deep understanding of our business and our needs, with a solution built from proven experience,” she adds. With training and support from Savance, Dickman Supply successfully went live across all four locations over a weekend without experiencing any downtime or business disruption.

One of the most valuable parts of the Go-Live was working hand-in-hand with Savance’s implementation team. With more than 26 years of business knowledge and a deep understanding of their current platforms, Julie and Mike served as project champions for the Dickman organization.“ As a transition champion, Julie’s ability to understand how the data needed to be organized and prioritized was critical to our teams working together to go live in our devoted project timeline,” says Savance’s Jessica Sak.

“Many people put the oneness on the ERP company when completing an ERP transition. While it’s true that we (the ERP transition teams) take on the majority of the work to ensure the migration is smooth, timely, and accurate, these transitions are about partnership. Having folks like Julie and Mikey who are detail-oriented and understand the bigger picture is invaluable to making transitions successful,” adds Sak.