COMPANY PROFILE
- Name: Turbo Wholesale Tires, Inc.
- Location: Irwindale, CA
- Industry: Auto Tires
- Products: Wholesale Tire Distributor
- Website: https://turbotires.net
- ERP: SAP Business One
- SAP Industry Extension Solution: Softengine Ecommerce Connector to Tireweb Ecommerce, Softengine Price Update Add-on
Industry-leading Wholesale Tire Distributor Rolls into the Future with Enhanced SAP Business One ERP System
Inventory, Pricing, and eCommerce Issues Resolved. Softengine Delivers Expert Implementation and Follow-up.
Sarkis Sepetjian, a Lebanese-Armenian immigrant, incorporated his tire business under the name “Turbo Wholesale Tires, Inc.” in 1987. Since that time, the company has been a trusted industry-leading tire supplier to wholesalers throughout the U.S, Europe and Asia. In addition to selling well-known brands such as Pirelli, Dunlop, Bridgestone, Goodyear and Falken, the company also markets its own proprietary brands — Lexani, RBP, Lizetti and Lionhart. Turbo manages over 12,000 SKU’s and keeps over ½ million tires in stock at its 300,000-square-foot facility in Irwindale, California. The company ships tires direct to customers and from factories located in the U.S. and overseas. Tires are available around the clock via their Tireweb online ordering system.
Massive Inventory, Multi-level Pricing Structure and Transaction Volume Overwhelm Entry-level Accounting Software.
Back in 2007, Turbo Wholesale Tires came to a realization that many other fast-growing businesses eventually reach — an entry-level accounting program is inadequate to handle thousands of daily transactions and an inventory of hundreds of thousands of items.
And that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Their software couldn’t support multi-level pricing, which is a key component of their sales model. Turbo offers many different pricing/discount levels to its customers, which include high-volume and smaller, independent tire dealers in the domestic market as well as international wholesalers from Europe and Asia.
The software didn’t support multiple warehouses, which led to inventory tracking issues with tires moving between warehouse locations. Moreover, invoicing options were few and they had to incorporate a separate entry-level accounting program just to write checks. Since the two accounting programs were not integrated, staff had to manually reenter the check information from one system into the other.
The cumulative impact of all these deficiencies and inefficiencies led management to consider a much-needed upgrade to a more powerful ERP system that would resolve their issues. Online ordering had emerged as the preferred method for a majority of their customers, thus it made sense to implement a flexible ecommerce platform that could integrate seamlessly with their new ERP system. In addition, they wanted the new system to offer access to real-time data across all departments so that management and staff were always on the same page.
Integrated SAP Business One, Pricing and Ecommerce Add-ons Inflate Confidence in All Business Processes.
The quest for the right ERP solution led management to SAP Business One, and a subsequent search for a reputable SAP Business Partner to perform the implementation led to Softengine, an SAP Gold Partner (www.softengine.com).
According to Virginia J. Gregorian, Chief Operations Officer for Turbo Wholesale Tires, there were three key areas they wanted to address with the implementation of a new system:
Inventory Control
Since Turbo Wholesale Tires maintains over 12,000 SKU’s and keeps more than a half-million tires in stock, they needed the new system to provide real-time inventory tracking and the ability to generate a wide range of reports on-demand to provide the information they needed to make the best possible decisions. Fortunately, SAP Business One offers a broad array of built-in detailed reports on stock transactions, inventory valuations and inventory counts that help the company stay on top of their massive inventory.
Gregorian relies heavily on the information she gets from one report in particular — the Inventory in Warehouse Report. “This report lets us run our inventory by brand, by style and by warehouse and it also offers an option to print out an item’s last purchase price or last evaluated price (average price), which is very helpful in tracking our costs,” she said. “We also take advantage of numerous SAP Business One standard reports in the Sales Analysis and Purchase Analysis modules, which we can run by item, by customer or by salesperson. Having access to all of these reports enables us to see everything we need to know about all 12,000 SKU’s and our extensive inventory in just five minutes. Moreover, with thousands of tires going in and out of our 61 loading docks every day, the system is really helpful at keeping operations in sync.”
Pricing Control
Softengine customized the SAP Price Update add-on to work in concert with SAP Business One. “This add-on enables us to take our costs and apply the appropriate mark-ups and discounts for our many types of customers,” said Gregorian.
“The SAP Price Update add-on enables us to apply discounts in a number of ways — by brand, by customer or by quantity ordered. The bottom line is that we can now manage multi-layer pricing with ease and that’s a huge relief for us.”
Ecommerce Integration
Six years ago, Softengine facilitated the integration between E-Solution Professionals’ Tireweb system and SAP Business One. “Considering that more than half of our sales are online, we wanted to make sure that our customers could enjoy a convenient way to place orders and track their own purchase history from our system,” claimed Gregorian. “Softengine configured the system to mirror some of the functions found in the SAP Business One’s Sales & Distribution module, especially those related to sales orders and invoices.
Here’s how it works — our customer logs in to Tireweb and places an order, which simultaneously goes directly to the warehouse where it is printed and to the Sales & Distribution module in SAP Business One. The great thing is that the two systems operate totally in sync with one another, which really helps us control our inventory.”
Turbo Hums Along with Inventory, Pricing and Online Ordering Running at Peak Performance. Softengine Provides Top-level Expertise and Care at Every Turn.
Virginia Gregorian and her associates have found stability with their SAP Business One system and its integrated pricing and ecommerce add-on solutions. “The complete system empowers us to effectively manage a huge volume of daily transactions, including 20,000 invoices per month, all of our SKU’s and our massive inventory,” claimed Gregorian. “With all components fully integrated, human input and the associated risk for errors are minimized.”
“Our ability to control all of our pricing levels is such a benefit,” she added. “First, I can do everything myself without any assistance from others. Second and very important, we can provide a higher level of customer service since pricing mistakes on orders and invoices are rare. We don’t have to worry about customers calling us to complain about errors on their orders, which can lead to messy disputes.”
“The integration of the customized ecommerce solution has been a winner for all concerned,” added Gregorian. “We have made it so convenient for our customers to place orders online whenever they want and they have instant access to their order status and history. Customers also have access to an online tool that connects them to the SAP Business One database where they can see real-time availability of items (out of stock items are listed in red) and pricing. Online sellers of our products can also view a live inventory of what we currently have in stock.”
Turbo Wholesale Tires’ management really appreciates the crucial role that the Softengine team played in the successful implementation of SAP Business One and their continued steadying presence, especially during the occasional upgrades to the system.
“Our experience with Softengine has been extremely positive,” asserted Gregorian.” “Any time we call for assistance, they always assign someone who’s highly professional and gets the job done quickly. Interestingly enough, I’ve become so much more educated about IT-related matters since working with the Softengine team on this project. Every time we need to upgrade the system, they walk me though all the steps to make sure that I completely understand what’s happening, which contributes to the overall success of the upgrade. It’s been a pleasure to work with them.”
Currently, Softengine is working with Turbo on a couple of projects as part of a second phase of the implementation. One is the incorporation of Softengine’s Warehouse Management System (WMS) to provide additional layers of organization to their warehouse. The second is an enhancement to the integration between SAP Business One and the Tireweb ecommerce system that will upgrade the current unidirectional data flow to a bidirectional data flow. Once completed, Turbo staff will be able to send final invoices to customers directly from SAP Business One after a product has shipped or is delivered.