Showroom of the Year Accelerates with New ERP

Savance’s vast experience in the electrical distribution industry parlayed well into what we need as a lighting distributor.

Background When you’re given the title “Lighting Showroom of the Year” you must be doing something right. As is the case with LightStyles in Cornelius, North Carolina. The destination Lighting Showroom received the award presented by Furniture, Lighting & Decor magazine during the 2021 Lightovation for their stand-out sales, resilience, and ingenuity to thrive in retail, even in a difficult climate. The Challenge After utilizing an outdated ERP Software for more than 15 years, Owner Skip Hulett decided it was time to streamline showroom operations, gain more control over inventory accuracy, and capitalize on fast order entry to meet customer demands. In their search, it was key that the new ERP software provided them with data and information in an instant to make showroom sales easy without losing the high level of service customers expected. The Solution “Savance’s vast experience in the electrical distribution industry parlayed well into what we need as a lighting distributor,” says Hulett. Greg Thorpe, Director of Business Systems for LightStyles applauds Savance’s intuitive inventory workflows. Thorpe, who has been managing the training and transition to Savance from Sage, says Savance Enterprise ERP Software significantly improves tracking and management of warehouse and showroom items. “Our old software was pretty much a free-for-all. You could do whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted without any restrictions,” explains Thorpe. “That created a huge problem for our business and the way we operate.” Now with Savance, the system is helping correct misplaced or unaccounted for inventory by alerting us as to what is actually on hand or special ordered. If something looks suspect, I get flagged. I can drill down to details such as who picked the item, whether it’s something that the warehouse was doing for our custom house, or if it was something that was a line item hold that our builder support department needs. The level of detail we can now get forces us to correct the inventory right then and there, instead of having to deal with it at the end of the year with a manual count and then adjust everything,” adds Thorpe. In addition, LightStyles chose to leverage Savance’s integration with XO Logic to improve rich product data and industry-specific information that feeds sales orders and quotes, their web store, and professional proposals. “When a salesperson is working with a customer, they have the ability to look up anything they need to know about a part on the floor. There is no need to stop what they are doing and go pull a price sheet.” “Our sales team members can simply hit the master file and it pulls up the information such as part number, UPC, description, and cost. All that data gets pulled in automatically from that master list that runs in the background saving our teams time and giving our customers a seamless showroom experience”.