Aadvantage Laundry is a Texas based distributor of coin and on-premise commercial laundry equipment. In recent years they have experienced tremendous growth. As a result they needed a software package that would improve their productivity, allowing them to expand without the need to add additional office staff. One key area of focus was their service department. Their service manager's method of dispatching calls involved a very creative manual filing system. There was a method to the madness, but the added volume due to the company's growth was making the madness more maddening.

They needed a productivity tool which would allow them to easily view and update the status of all of their open service orders. After contacting Nickerson Business Systems, they found such a tool in Encore's Service Order Control Center. With this new tool, the service manager can easily dispatch orders throughout the day, generate automatic purchase orders for parts, provide quick answers to customer inquiries, update order status as field technicians report in, and submit the order to the billing department once it is closed.

Control Centers can be found throughout Encore. Its one of the many features that sets Encore Accounting apart from all other accounting systems. There's a Control Center for the Shipping Department, Purchasing Department, Production Department, Sales Department, Service Department, and Credit Department. In every case, it provides a single screen where a user can easily manage and organize the day's work and insure that nothing slips through the cracks. And for Aadvantage Laundry as a whole, it has helped them to manage their tremendous success.

MEG is an El Segundo, California-based product development, manufacturing and licensing company specializing in children's character lines, toys and licenses. Since 2002, MEG has developed, licensed and manufactured five new toy brands that are distributed in over 50 countries. As with most of our customers, MEG learned of Nickerson Business systems though referral. Their VP of Operations contacted us hoping that we could design an online application that would help them manage the negotiation process between them and their overseas manufacturers. Each toy consists of several components and packaging elements, all of which have a cost attached that must be negotiated with the manufacturer. For years MEG would submit a request for proposal to the manufacturer via email. The manufacturer would then bid on each component of the proposed toy in a reply email. The negotiations would then continue through subsequent emails until a final price and quantity was approved by each side. Multiply this by 100 new toys in the pipeline at any given time and you can see where this method of bidding could get extremely confusing. Not only was it inefficient, but it made it very difficult for MEG to review the history of a particular product once they wanted to have it made again in the future.

Nickerson Business Systems designed an online quoting system which organized the entire process. This new tool allows MEG to create a bill of materials for a product they want manufactured, and then submit a request for proposal to a desired vendor. The vendor in turn enters the projected cost of each component at various quantities and submits the quote back to MEG. As the back-and-forth continues, the system retains the history of the bidding process on each quote and allows each party to see when the ball is in their court. Once a quote has been approved, it disappears from the Open Quotes screen. For future reference we created several reports which allow them to examine the Bill of Material Cost history and Cost comparison of an item over time.

This new Online tool has given the employees at MEG and their vendors a centralized source of communication, organization, and valuable historical data. And its accessible anywhere in the world.

Olde Thompson is the largest manufacturer of salt and pepper mills in the world. Their pepper mills are sold in over 30 countries worldwide from France to Japan, to Chile and Israel. Every 18 seconds of every day (24 hours a day, 365 days per year), someone buys an Olde Thompson pepper mill.

As the company grew and demand for their products increased, management quickly realized that they needed to make their warehouse processes as efficient as possible. So they turned to Nickerson Business Systems to design and implement a new warehouse management system for them. The key was to create a virtual warehouse for the receiving, production, and shipping departments where pallets could be placed anywhere and the system would know their content, age of the product, and warehouse location. It should then route pickers through the isles in the most efficient way possible to pull the goods they required. Each morning the shipping department warehouse manager would allocate a range of orders to each of the pickers for the day. Each person would carry with them a portable RF terminal which would instruct the bearer to scan the pallet ID and product UPC at each bin location the system guided them to in order to verify that they were in the right place and pulling from the proper pallet. This process insures that goods are removed on a first-in first-out basis and that nothing expires on the shelf. After orders are picked and placed on conveyor trays, the goods are then scanned again when they are boxed up for shipping. The content of each shipping box is retained to be submitted to the customer in the form of an EDI advance shipping notice. Customer compliant UCC128 barcode labels are then printed and placed on each box once it is sealed. Each barcode corresponds to the advanced shipping notice information that was forwarded to the customer. These labels also serve to record when boxes are placed onto trucks for shipping, warning the operator if any have been inadvertently left off the truck. At any given time, the warehouse manager can know the content of any remaining pallet in the warehouse and where to find it. Olde Thompson has been using this warehouse management system for several years now and considers it to be a vital part of their business.