Competition heats up in the professional builder market:

Atlanta based Home Depot has decided to be the No.1 diversified wholesaler with plans to grow the supply division to between $23 billion and $27 billion in the next 5 years. “The strategy of Home Depot is to repeat in the professional space the same type of market transformation The Home Depot executed in the do-it-yourself space” says Joe DeAngelo who leads Home Depot Supply. To help accomplish that goad, Home Depot Supply has been buying lots of distributors who sell to the professional builder.

How do you, the smaller distributor compete with a large company like Home Depot Supply? “By getting closer to the customer” says Ernie Countermarsh, senior vice president of industrial sales for F.W. Webb, a national distributor of plumbing, heating, cooling and piping products.

You can do that by investing in software that will help you to stay in touch with your customers. You can do that by knowing what they buy before they buy it, so you can provide them the service they demand. You can compete with larger companies by having even better Business Intelligence software working for you.

Friendly Systems has shown its allies how to use Business Intelligence to keep track of key events. You can be sent reports, emails or event text messages as soon as a specified event occurs. Some examples are: a sales order that becomes 10 days old; a purchase order that does not arrive on the due date for your largest customer. Perhaps you want to know when an invoice goes over 50 days old. We can do that and allow you can follow up before it becomes a big headache.

Business Intelligence: We call it the Worrying Module