National Band Saw

The Company

National Band Saw Company, based in Lancaster, CA, has been in business since 1953. They started out as a service company in Los Angeles, until the company discovered that in order to provide the best service possible, they needed to manufacture the replacement parts themselves. As their business grew, so did the number of parts they had on hand, so much so that they decided to sell their extras — and a new business was born.

Today the company runs a 21,000-square-foot warehouse dedicated to manufacturing and distributing heavy duty kitchen machinery parts. They are now the largest independent manufacturer and supplier of replacement parts for the food machinery service industry, with a product line that includes over 2,600 parts.

The Challenge

Anyone who’s had exposure to Microsoft Dynamics GP’s user interface can attest to its complexity. As Harley Frank, President and CEO of National Band Saw, put it, “Great Plains is designed, almost exclusively, it seems, for tech people.”

In addition to their struggles with GP’s complicated interface, National Band Saw had more demanding operational processes that needed support, including drop-shippping, a process that requires vendors to ship orders directly to customers.

National Band Saw was in the market for a software solution that was easy to work with, could handle complex shipping demands, and didn’t compromise on power or scope.

The Solution

SalesPad. While GP might be geared toward the more technically-minded user, Frank points out that “SalesPad is designed for the rest of us.”

SalesPad’s order-to-cash acceleration solution accompanies GP, streamlining once-complicated processes and opening opportunities for new areas of functionality. Just as SalesPad requires GP to function, companies need SalesPad to use GP simply and efficiently, Vice President of National Band Saw Jason Jasperson says.

“We’ve been on it for seven years now, and I can’t imagine not having it. And as we go forward, SalesPad will be one of the main staples that we keep for our company,” he noted. “We’ve been able to increase sales, increase our productivity, keep the same exact business model that we had before, all while still keeping costs down,” Jasperson said. “It allows our two guys that process anywhere from 60 to 100 orders a day to do that with about 98% accuracy on a daily basis.”

Shipping made simple

ShipTo, SalesPad’s shipment management hub, takes the headache out of drop-shipping for National Band Saw. They’ve customized their process to the point where the software does nearly all the work for them — labels are printed correctly, addresses are copied accurately, packaging notes are recorded for each order, and shipments are sent out on time, every time. 

The combination of SalesPad and ShipTo streamlined National Band Saw’s processes and allowed the company to increase the number of orders they fulfill on a daily basis, simply due to the automation rules and workflow that the two systems provided, says Jasperson.

“We have twelve or thirteen different customized fields that are tied to both our sales order entry screen and the customer card, along with ShipTo,” Jasperson says.

Those customized fields eliminated many of the manual steps that previously slowed them down, ensuring that everything now ships out correctly in the shipping department.

Facilitate Growth with better inventory management

SalesPad’s inventory management capabilities help National Band Saw not only better manage their current inventory needs, but facilitate company growth as well. Building a replenishment strategy they can trust is a big contributor to that growth. 

“It is much easier to keep track of items that are going close to backorder, or items that need to be replenished, how many of this we have, what we’re using, and how fast we’re using it,” NBS President Frank says. “It is infinitely easier than GP … just one touch, you get your answer.”

Frank is particularly fond of SalesPad’s ability to help him create an appropriate restocking plan, as inventory storage and movement is so important to a manufacturing company such as National Band Saw.

“SalesPad allows us to facilitate growth,” he added, “and it helps us make projections as we plan out the future of our company. It improved our ability to function just dramatically.”

“Before we started using SalesPad,” Jasperson continues, “we were using the Assembly module in GP, and the visibility for inventory management was very limited. There were a lot of clicks and a lot of steps. SalesPad has opened up the scope of things that we can see and made it much easier to see critical inventory information.”

Keep tabs on what’s selling with sales monitor and quick reports

Frank observed that SalesPad’s reporting functions help him monitor sales trends on both a per-customer and per-item basis, which is extremely useful to him as it provides executive insight into the health of their business. This information is critical when it comes to making strategic decisions on how to advance the company.

“The main way that SalesPad helps a business owner or manager get a good look at the day-to-day happenings in their business is through the Sales Monitor. It’s by far one of the best tools that we can use,” says Jasperson. “With the workflow aspect of it, we can see where things are and where they’re going, and we can refresh that information as often as we want to.

“We’ve also created a couple of Quick Reports that allow us to see what our sales are year to date, month to date, or on the previous day. Then, using the Sales Monitor, we can calculate out to see where we’re at and determine what we need to do to meet our monthly goals.”

Every department within National Band Saw utilizes SalesPad in one way or another, and each of their employees knows how to use it within the context of their particular job. SalesPad’s customization options on a per-user basis make everyone’s job even easier. For example, shipping department employees can be given to certain layouts and fields, but the customer service reps only have access to a different set of screens.

For Jasperson, working with the SalesPad support team has allowed National Band Saw to really take advantage of what SalesPad can do for their order-to-cash cycle. By learning how to customize the layouts and gain access to historical company data (even data that was inputted before National Band Saw began using SalesPad), they’ve turned their business software into a tool that helps them accelerate their business and experience more success as a company. 

“SalesPad has saved us an unquantifiable amount,” concludes Jasperson, “simply because the access to all that information, from something as simple as a tracking number to any number of quick reports, and the fact that we’ve been able to customize it so much, has just been priceless, and it’s been a huge factor in our growth as a company.”