Lawn Equipment Parts CO. (LEPCO)

The Solution
The LEPCO team wanted a holistic system that was fully integrated with all major functional areas of its business. This included ERP functionality for accounting, purchasing, marketing, sales, and warehouse automation, which LEPCO considers to be the heart and soul of its organization. The warehouse is where the company’s service levels are truly defined for delivery to its dealers. The company selected VAI S2K Enterprise to run all these functions and to meet its growth needs.

A lot of good things came out of the implementation process, including team-building opportunities. For example, the LEPCO team named the project, “Project K2S,” which was defined as Key to Success, and S2K reversed. The LEPCO team even had a tagline, “Fertilizing Our Future.” This helped build momentum between the teams as the project launched.

Said Rob Kintner, Director of Human Resources at LEPCO, “VAI’s S2K, from the end user experience, has been a huge upgrade for us. S2K offers that entry point through Smart Center which is a personalized dashboard containing all applications we wish to view. There's a lot of things right there when you log into the system that you have available to you, and it provides the opportunity to dig in further through the backend. From that standpoint, it's a very seamless way to utilize the system. And really, it's the platform that we saw, and we see today continuing to grow and enhance our service levels, which is of the utmost importance.”

LEPCO had an entire conveyor system already set up with sortation centers and did not want to redo its entire physical location for a new ERP system. VAI’s WMS software offers the latest WMS technology to help build a warehouse with significantly improved operations, enhanced employee productivity, and customer satisfaction. It also enables users to monitor warehouse activities in real-time, reducing entry errors and assisting in gauging the effectiveness of warehouse staff.

“When our warehouse workers create a shipping label, whether it's at time of release from route manager or whether it's at parts verification, that label has a barcode that is integrated into the label on each single sortation center where we want it to go,” said Chris Reinhold, Director of Operations at LEPCO.

The system has several readers, and when a label passes beneath a conveyor, sorter, or scanner—which will identify where the label goes—it detects the box and follows it directly to the sorter where it should be. One or ten orders could be included in each shipment. LEPCO can access Route Manager, launch it, and check if the order has been fully picked and verified or is still in the picking process at any point by using the color coordination system. Once it's fully picked, verified, and processed, the user then goes in, closes that shipment, asks for the bill of lading, invoice, and whatever paperwork goes with it, and the shipment is loaded onto a truck.

The Result
As the main purchases of Exmark and Echo products, Mark Hessinger, Vice President & Co-Owner, said his main responsibility is procurement and uses VAI’s S2K extensively to streamline and automate purchasing processes for LEPCO. “It works fantastically for me in terms of sales history and the information I pull. It's very accurate. It's very timely. It's very helpful when it comes to forecasting products and bringing products into the system. Innovation within the lawn care equipment has been awesome, is the only way I could say it. I mean, it helps us process things quicker through all the ordering processes.”

LEPCO used to have three to five local employees accepting orders in addition to its TMs who were out on the road. Since using VAI's software, the business has operated more profitably. LEPCO's facilities have expanded because of its increased sales. Using VAI ERP, LEPCO has improved corporate management and efficiency across the board, from product shipping to communication.

Since the launch, LEPCO has been leveraging VAI ERP to:
• Run multiple functions, including e-commerce, shipping, and inventory.
• Significantly improve its customer experience, especially when compared to its previous ERP software.
• Gain efficiency by developing the ability to upload and process data, such as billings, warranties, rebates, incentives, and vendor invoices, through the system.