Ohio Power Tool

The Company

Ohio Power Tool is a family-owned and operated business based out of Columbus, Ohio. Since 1983, they’ve been hard at work selling, renting, and servicing all major brands of tools. They started out as a repair shop run by the company’s founder Jim Amstutz, but have since expanded both their services and employee base.

The Challenge

Ohio Power Tool’s motto is, “We can help you find the right tool for the job,” reflecting the company’s commitment to helping solve their customers’ problems, no matter how challenging.

With that dedication to smart, savvy solutions in mind, Suzanne Amstutz, head of HR at Ohio Power Tool, needed to find the right order-to-cash management system for the employees at Ohio Power Tool. They needed a software solution that would increase efficiency and enable staff members to better serve their customers.

Ohio Power Tool has been a Microsoft Dynamics GP customer since the days of the DOS version, and while they are happy with its performance, usability became an issue as the company experienced growth.

“Dynamics GP is just so cumbersome,” says Amstutz, “and you have to click through so many screens.” The clunky interface was slowing employees down as they worked to quickly process sales orders, which is a boat no company wants to be in.

The Solution

SalesPad. A customer service representative at Dynamics GP suggested Ohio Power Tool look into SalesPad as a way to both enhance Dynamics GP and make Ohio Power Tool’s operations easier. So they set up a demo, and they were quickly sold on what SalesPad could do for them.

“Our business is somewhat complicated because of all the different services we offer,” says Jay Amstutz, President of Ohio Power Tool. He was impressed, though, with how smoothly SalesPad could handle their complex business processes. The company was thrilled at how easy handling phone and online orders became, and they were further impressed by how much they were able to improve their inventory management practices.

Customer insights, at their fingertips

Suzanne Amstutz really likes the customer lookup feature in SalesPad. That instant access to a customer’s transaction history, open sales orders, and other pertinent data has proven invaluable to Ohio Power Tool. Being able to quickly locate related documents for a customer, such as returns associated with an invoice, is another feature that Ohio Power Tool finds very useful as they work to provide the best customer experience possible.

“We have so many different kinds of interactions with our customers,” says Suzanne. “Phone orders, web orders, follow-ups...and everything we need is right there.”

Smoother warehouse operations

Before SalesPad, Ohio Power Tool was managing inventory the “old school way.”

“We’d just put it on the shelf,” says Jay, “and [when we needed it], it would just be there, hopefully. But, of course, it doesn’t always work out that way. Just finding stuff was often a big challenge for us.”

Since implementing SalesPad and pairing it with DataCollection, SalesPad’s native barcoding solution, the warehouse at Ohio Power Tool has been given a new lease on life. Tracking inventory has never been easier, and by using features such as multi-bin locations within the warehouse, finding the exact tool or part they need is simple for the warehouse staff.

Maintaining accuracy against sales orders is simplified through DataCollection as well; every order has a barcode on it, which makes fulfilling a much more efficient process, as every warehouse employee knows exactly what inventory is associated with every order simply by scanning the barcode. There’s no fuss or confusion. Orders are picked, packed, and shipped more efficiently.

Flexible workflows for every situation

“We needed different processes for each of our company’s services,” says Jay. “For example, a rental requires a completely different type of transaction than something coming in for warranty work, which are both completely different from a standard online transaction. We needed a solution that could handle all of that.”

Before implementing SalesPad, handling such a variety of tasks required using multiple software applications, took much longer, and was much more complicated for the CSRs handling the transaction. If a step was missed while taking payment information in their separate payment processing software, it could potentially derail the entire transaction, all with a customer waiting on the phone the whole time.

But by consolidating various services (such as payment processing) into one order-to-cash solution and leveraging SalesPad’s workflow functionality, Ohio Power Tool was able to streamline their order processing.

Suzanne agrees. “SalesPad has helped us a lot with streamlining processes, and with ease of use. It helps our staff access the data they need more quickly. It just makes everything so much easier.”