CASE STUDY
Plumbers’ Supply Company Brings Price and Profit
Optimization In-house with epaCUBE Profit
Optimizer®
Leading wholesale distributor is able to find new opportunities for
profits with leading software solution.
CHALLENGES
- Inconsistent pricing and
too many manual
overrides
- Lack
of visibility
intoStudy
Plumbers’
Supply Case
impact of price changes
SOLUTION
Brought pricing and
profitability analysis inhouse with help of
epaCUBE’s
FASTPATH
www.epacube.com
program
RESULTS
Can now instantly
visualize and use the
optimization results to
identify and resolve issues
1
with pricing and segments
Looking to Drive New
Profit
“Like every distributor, we are
constantly looking to drive new
profit and better serve our
customers,” says Sean Jones of
Plumbers’ Supply Company. The
New Bedford, MA wholesale
distributor of plumbing, heating,
air conditioning and well
implementation process, so
Jones was concerned about the
level of investment and staff
commitment a pricing and
segmentation project might
involve.
Plumbers’ Supply decided to
turn to a pricing consulting
service initially rather than
implement epaCUBE’s Profit
“Within 30 days, I completed the initial
training, had data loaded and most
importantly, had analytics and pricing
guidance which I can use right now to
make pricing decisions for gross profit
improvement.”
supplies recently decided to
focus their profitability initiatives
on their pricing matrices and
improved segmentation.
“It seems that with each year
that goes by, revamping our
pricing matrix becomes even
more important, yet it never
gets done,” says Jones. “We
originally looked at epaCUBE
back in 2011 and we were
extremely impressed with the
analytic capability of the
software.” But at that time,
epaCUBE had not released their
flexible cloud subscription
model or their FASTPATH
Plumbers’ Supply Case Study
Optimizer software. “At the
time,” Jones says, “we lacked a
full-time pricing person and felt
a consulting service would give
us some outsourced
capabilities.”
The Limits of Pricing
Consulting
“With our consulting service, we
focused on low-hanging fruit
and got some margin pick-up
quickly,” says Jones, “but things
got much harder as we added
more products and customers
to the analysis.”
www.epacube.com
Plumbers’ Supply felt limited by
the number of metrics their
consultant could analyze
quickly. The service could
analyze simple metrics like sales
volume, but Jones wanted to
take their segmentation analysis
much further with metrics for
sales opportunities, days sales
outstanding and cost to serve.
Adding that level of granularity
to the segmentation proved to
be a challenge for their
consulting service.
With epaCUBE Plumbers’ Supply
is conducting a what-if analysis
of price and segment changes
with immediate visibility into the
impact of those changes.
It Was Time For a
Change
“We have nothing but good
things to say about our pricing
consultants,” says Jones, “but
there’s only so far you can go
with outsourcing.”
Jones knew they needed to
reduce the number of manual
overrides at their locations, and
the way to accomplish that was
with an integrated software
solution. “I was running reports
all the time,” says Jones. “The
integration epaCUBE has to our
ERP system is huge.” Prior to
epaCUBE, the pricing consultant
2
would make suggestions, Jones
would have to format that
changes into an acceptable
format for his ERP software,
import the changes into the
software, and then implement
the changes. “The process could
take days,” says Jones. “We
would have to work around
their schedule, but sometimes
there was just too much riding
on each decision to wait that
long.”
change, Jones can review a
what-if analysis to fully
understand the impact of new
pricing moves.
epaCUBE Made it Easy
Fortunately for Jones, things had
changed at epaCUBE over those
four years as well. The team at
epaCUBE had worked hard to
make the software easier than
ever to use, changed their
pricing model to a flexible, cloud
subscription and began offering
epaCUBE Price Optimizer allows a new FASTPATH process where
Plumbers’ Supply to take control epaCUBE experts help you run
of their own pricing in their own the software for immediate
timeframe. Using industry best
profit gains.
practices built into the software,
epaCUBE instantly presents
Plumbers’ Supply had recently
opportunities for gross profit
implemented a business
improvement through
intelligence solution that
optimized pricing without having suffered from performance
to wait for a consultant’s
issues and Jones was worried
spreadsheet. Plumbers’ Supply
that implementing epaCUBE
can then validate and adjust the would be similarly frustrating.
optimization recommendations “Setting up epaCUBE was
based on their own knowledge
comparatively a breeze,” says
of their customers and markets. Jones. “With epaCUBE, you’re
Then, before implementing a
not pulling data daily or hourly,
Plumbers’ Supply Case Study
www.epacube.com
so there are no performance
strains on your system. And
their consulting team made
everything easy for us to get
started and find new profit
opportunities.”
Real Results, Real Fast
While it is still too early to
estimate the full impact of the
epaCUBE software solution,
Jones is happy with the initial
phases of the project. “Within 30
days” says Jones, ”I completed
the initial training, had data
loaded, and most importantly,
had analytics and pricing
guidance which I can use right
now to make pricing decisions
for gross profit improvement.”
Using epaCUBE, Plumbers’
Supply could instantly visualize
and use the optimization results
to identify and resolve issues
that had developed over time.
epaCUBE allows Plumbers’
Supply to analyze pricing by
product or customer, product
or customer group, a
combination of different
customers groups who buy
different product groups, by
vendor, branch or salesperson.
They can now continuously
improve your gross profits
through optimized pricing by
analyzing the gross profit
3
improvement opportunities
inside their sales, product and
customer data.
“Thanks to the immediate
analysis inside of epaCUBE, we
can identify places where we
can actually simplify our pricing
Corporate Headquarters
201 Main St., Suite 600 |
Ft. Worth, TX 76102
(972) 931-8423
Plumbers’ Supply Case Study
matrix and make more profit,”
says Jones.
Jones estimates that the
potential for return on
investment with epaCUBE is
only limited to the amount of
time a distributor puts into it.
“epaCUBE is flexible enough to
fit into your schedule and the
more time you spend with it the
more opportunities you find to
increase profit,” says Jones.
epaCUBE Profit Optimizer software and our new FASTPATH
implementation process has changed everything you know about
wholesale distribution profit optimization by and the results are clear: The
average distributor using epaCUBE realized a 5.5% gross profit
improvement which translates into over $3 million in new gross profit and
over $21 million in increased enterprise value.
www.epacube.com
4