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Above left: James Mitchell: “merchants are looking to have digital process and solutions” Centre: Ian Oldrey: “Information needs to be quicker and easier to access” Above right: Technology is increasingly accessible from the workplace PHOTO: EPICOR
ways to reduce costs and drive growth, said James Mitchell, adding that KCS’s product roadmaps are all geared towards meeting those challenges.
It’s a similar message from Epicor, with Mark Hughes highlighting supply chain issues, soaring prices and staff shortages as major challenges for the merchant sector. “We had a period last year when some were buying stock ‘just-in-case’ and when it was available,” he said. “Now they are questioning if they really need stock at the moment and whether they are going to be left with it. “These are the balances they are weighing up and we can help by capturing data and turning that into information that can help decision making. Accuracy of inventory and of sales are absolutely key because if you don’t know what you’ve got, you can’t make decisions about what is moving and what you need to buy.”
He added that rising fuel costs had made optimised vehicle loading and routing even more crucial than before and that Epicor “is geared up to help, especially in this industry.”
Ian Oldrey, managing director at Ten-25, said that the fight to keep margins ahead of the constantly rising prices had led to an
increase in demand for “more information at their fingertips”.
“Information needs to be quicker and easier to access,” he said. “Merchants need to be able to track costs as accurately as possible because they are shifting. Whereas, in the past, they may have confidently known some products were so much a cubic metre, that may not be the case now and many loads may have been brought in with very different costs.”
He said that one of the latest developments within Ten-25’s Merchanter software that had helped customers with their buying decisions was the facility to report stock and usage by length.
“It helps merchants determine what their customers are buying, what they are taking to the mill, what they are using to sell direct to customers and what they need to be buying,” said Mr Oldrey. “It’s not just about sales activity, but also about usage activity.” Last year’s upgrade to Merchanter added considerably more timber functionality on both the merchanting and the processing side. “We have quite significantly beefed up how timber certification can be recorded within the system,” said Mr Oldrey. “If businesses want to go to this level of detail they can
see what certification schemes mills are working with, check whether the certificates are valid and record that in their own system so they can track certification on a supplier- by-supplier basis. They can allocate source country and even record things like product categorisation for each of the certification bodies, so they can do their reporting by the PEFC and FSC product categorisations as well as on a product-by-product and transaction- by-transaction basis.”
Another new feature is the ability to summarise the contents of a mixed pack. “So, where you have a whole series of packs that have different lengths within them, it summarises them into, for example, half a pack of 4.2s or 3.6s and this means that sales quantities can quickly be identified,” said Mr Oldrey.
On the milling side, the software now has the ability to follow a pack from when it comes in as raw material, through the milling or treatment process, creating a “mirror pack”. “It retains not only its pack identity as it converts from one product to another, but it also keeps its full history. Even though it’s been converted from one product to another, from a system point of view you don’t lose that traceability.” ►
www.ttjonline.com | July/August 2022 | TTJ
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