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Distributor Increases Sales by 25 to 50 Percent with Solid Route Accounting™ - Enterprise Edition

Noble House Distribution Ltd. from Sherwood Park, AB, Canada is a food distributor that carries approximately 1000 SKUs with six trucks running in the Edmonton area. They have been using Solid Route Accounting™ - Enterprise Edition, a mobile route accounting software for DSD distributors, since 2000. In this interview, owner Rick O’Donnell talks about Noble House’s experience with Solid Route Accounting™ - Enterprise Edition.

Solid Innovation: How has Solid Route Accounting™ - Enterprise Edition improved how you do your inventory control?
Rick: Well, number one, it’s allowing us to count inventory a lot easier than in the past. I can control and keep a record of what my drivers are taking out of the warehouse and putting on to their trucks and what they sold. This has made inventory control more efficient. In addition, being able to scan and key in the numbers versus handwriting invoices is certainly a big benefit. And our customer and product lists and all the other information our drivers need is on the hand held, too.

Solid Innovation: How much has it improved your sales?
Rick: Sales on the truck are up 25 to 50 percent with the handhelds now. With manual invoices, our drivers were doing $2500 – $3000 a day. With computer generated invoices, they are writing $4000, $5000 or $6000 a day in my territory. There’s no way in the world they could have written that with doing manual invoices.

Solid Innovation: Tell us how computer generated invoices have helped your company.
Rick: An invoice created on the handheld is accurate, we know it’s accurate and the store knows it’s accurate. Reducing calculation mistakes on the invoices has been a great benefit to us. In addition, you can not service corporate customers now without having computer generated invoices, the industry doesn’t allow it. Corporate customers want the price recorded, the extended price recorded, the GST (the Goods & Services Tax in Canada) shown and the invoice numbers on the invoice. The invoices we create on the handhelds provide all of that information.

Solid Innovation: How has Solid Route Accounting™ - Enterprise Edition improved your relationships with your corporate suppliers?
Rick: There are suppliers out there that won’t do business with you if you can’t do the monthly and quarterly reporting. When you’re a salesman going in to talk to some of the corporates, one of the first things they ask about is the availability to report. If we can’t give them the reports they want, we wouldn’t even be considered to do that business. The reporting features we have with Solid Route Accounting™ - Enterprise Edition are more than adequate to fulfill the needs of our suppliers.

Solid Innovation: What reports do you use that help you?
Rick: The reports we use the most help us to track the sales for all of our suppliers and track the sales for all of our customers. In addition, we like the Sales Commission Report, which helps us figure out our drivers’ commissions on a monthly basis. For our corporate customers, we generate reports showing what sales we are doing per supplier, and we compare one month to the next month. We generate reports by the SKUs, the sales and the returns. For example, I can figure out my returns in the sandwich industry. There’s a certain percentage of stales and outdated product, and by printing out a report on the whole category from one supplier, I can total up the sales and total up the returns, and I know what my returns are per SKU.

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