May 23, 2023 PathGuide Helps Rampart Supply Invest in What Matters

Advanced VMI by PathGuide helped Rampart Supply automate the setting up, tracking and invoicing of vendor managed inventory at 12 locations.

Rampart Supply has evolved quite a bit over the past 55 years; however, one thing that has remained at the heart of its business model is “invest in what matters.”

Since the company’s inception as a small plumbing supply house with three employees, Rampart has grown into a full-line wholesale distributor with three branches, over 500,000 square feet of stocked shelves, three showrooms, and more than 250 employees serving the state of Colorado. Today, Rampart’s core business includes plumbing, hydronic heating and industrial pipe, valve, & fittings (PVF), serving residential, commercial, and various industrial and facility maintenance sectors. The company believes in stocking a deep and diversified inventory, and its experienced staff is committed to exceeding expectations by providing customers with exceptional service and product knowledge.

As the company’s IT Director, Richard Snapp leads a skilled team at Rampart – and like many department heads, is inundated with offers for services that claim to help make the business run faster, better, and cheaper. “Once you get the IT Director title, it feels like you start getting 15,000 sales calls a day,” says Snapp. “Part of my job is to vet those services to determine what makes sense and what doesn’t, but also figure out what projects we can handle both bandwidth-wise and financially.”

While Snapp admits he had felt that most vendor relationships were painful but necessary, he says that PathGuide Technologies is an exception to the rule. “They are one of the few I’ve found to be really easy and enjoyable to work with,” Snapp shares.

Software is only as good as the support behind it

Prior to its engagement with PathGuide, the primary pain point for Rampart – “number one, far and away,” Snapp emphasizes – was support. “From the VMI perspective, it was a service that we were extremely interested in. We had another product that was implemented before I joined Rampart,” states Snapp. “Unfortunately, things started to unravel. Their support wasn’t great and as we started to analyze its capabilities more, it just didn’t solve our particular problem.”

For the next six months, Rampart still had VMI sites set up with customers – it just didn’t have the software or system in place to service those locations. And because the previous VMI solution had performed so poorly, Rampart’s sales representatives assigned to those VMI sites ended up doing all of the inventory tracking and management by hand.

In other words, the need to find an alternative VMI solution became a top priority. That’s when Rampart heard about PathGuide’s Advanced VMI solution and scheduled a product demo.

Moving forward with Advanced VMI

Snapp participated in a demo with PathGuide’s vice president of research & development, Greg Laycock, and was immediately impressed with the deep functionality of the product, and the company’s grasp on the inventory model.

“We walked through Advanced VMI, the general concepts and how it would meet our specific needs. Then we talked about Rampart’s existing processes and how we could morph those into something better,” shares Snapp, who has a background in development. “I feel like I’ve always been a good judge of people’s skill sets. For me, being a decision-maker at Rampart as well as a technical person, this early read and affirmative judgment around the personal skill set PathGuide had to offer along with its technology was a really important first step.”

Snapp realized his good fortune and appreciated that PathGuide’s Advanced VMI solution was ready to implement out of the box and could move forward without large obstacles to overcome. “Working with Greg was nice and easy. The project timeframe was always on track and each step was crystal clear,” Snapp affirms. “He gave us only what we needed to do, rather than an arbitrary document with five generic to-dos for us to complete before giving him a call back.”

“We talked on the phone throughout the process, and we made it happen,” Snapp continues. “We made sure that Greg could access what he needed and then let him go for a couple months to integrate Advanced VMI with Infor SX.e at that point.”

Fast forward to implementation, sales enablement

Prior to its implementation of PathGuide’s Advanced VMI, Rampart was utilizing manual processes to set up and track vendor managed inventory, as well as invoicing the inventory as it was consumed. PathGuide’s Advanced VMI module provides tighter integration into SX.e, and offers much more automation and flexibility around fulfillment, replenishment and invoicing. For Rampart, running Advanced VMI also introduced more flexible options related to much larger VMI customers.

“Not only did we have a feeling with PathGuide that we would get better development speeds and response times, but it quickly became clear this was also a much, much better product. So, it was a win-win all around,” states Snapp.

Snapp has the highest of praise for the PathGuide team. He found the communication and attention to detail from Laycock and exceptional service and support from the internal technical team were the perfect blend to round out Rampart’s end-to-end experience with PathGuide. Snapp also shares that Rampart’s sales team has already realized significant value from using Advanced VMI – particularly in terms of time savings. “We visit each of our locations weekly. Our count/fulfillment time per location has reduced from an average of four hours to an average of 30 minutes,” notes Snapp. “For six locations, this amounts to roughly 21 hours per week. And that’s just direct time savings on the count front. We also see fewer errors, which saves us another few hours each week on rework.”

From eight sites at the outset of the Advanced VMI implementation to nearly a dozen today, PathGuide’s software solution has allowed Rampart’s sales representatives to earn more business while exceeding their customers’ expectations and experience. Rampart’s sales teams now have more time to focus on customer engagement, which has contributed to the company’s 10% increase in sales over the first year after implementation.

“That kind of response and turnaround time is exactly what I hope for and dream about when we work with a third party. The whole point of vendor managed inventory is to help enable sales. If we’re able to do that and amplify our sales team’s efforts, then I can sleep well knowing that we’re doing our job in IT,” concludes Snapp.

www.pathguide.com

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