Generating a report with accurate information went from hours to minutes

Displacing competitors, growing sales

For Bumbaugh, Phocas is where he starts his day identifying opportunities to share with his sales force, managing product pricing, reviewing codes for SKUs and allocating units to the company’s 3PL in California.

Generating a report with accurate information went from hours to minutes, as inputting large quantities of formulas was reduced to a few clicks using Phocas dashboards and dimensions. As sales coordinator, Bumbaugh is responsible for helping members of the sales team achieve their goals. He uses Phocas to monitor the performance of team members, focusing his efforts on helping those who are on the edge of hitting their budgets.

“The ability to track where our salespeople stand on budget at any time is a huge benefit for us,” said Bumbaugh. “Even if the information is not in our ERP, uploading a spreadsheet, tying it to dimensions and integrating a database is simple in Phocas, and we can prioritize next steps to help a sales person reach his or her budget.”

Each sales person has their own login, with the data access limited to the accounts they are assigned. After the initial training, many on the sales team set up their own dashboards and started to produce their own reports.

Bumbaugh added, “Our sales team quickly embraced Phocas and many turned to Phocas online training videos to see what else they could do. Today, the sales team uses “all the data in Phocas” to improve customer retention and sales volume. They turn to Phocas to justify budgets for customers, identify what customers are falling off, find upsell and cross-sell opportunities, and quickly uncover gaps in what customers aren’t stocking. Armed with this information, they set up meetings, review product lines and set up new orders."

The immediate access to see customer data and the ability to visualize that data has given our sales team new opportunities to improve customer service and increase orders,” said Bumbaugh. “They know who is buying what and — perhaps more important — what they are not buying. We’ve had numerous cases where customers were buying from competitors or buying some of our products but not others. With the help of Phocas, we have displaced competitors and increased orders of complementary products.

Becoming a more data-driven company

Bumbaugh also created executive dashboards and reports that are distributed daily and weekly.

The executive team sees the day-to-day adjustments that are being made, can quickly review people, product and customer data, and make budget decisions based on the information. The reports, which include sales data, gross profit and item class breakdowns, are then shared with corporate headquarters in Japan.

“We have access to more and different reporting, can see our data in a variety of ways, and jump around in dimensions to visualize our performance across numerous variables,” stated Bumbaugh. “Our sales team is thoroughly impressed with Phocas and has fully embraced the BI software, with some already expanding into custom-mode reporting. Phocas is a much simpler, much more trustworthy and reliable product than we used in the past, and it is helping KYB Americas become a more data-driven company.”