Joe: My name is Joe DelBrocco, our company is CarPak Manufacturing and we're a distribution company selling specialty fasteners to the automotive replacement part market. Our parts are used to make body, glass and trim repairs and end product is sold to distributors who sell to technicians or independent garages and dealers. KI Technology was brought to us by NCR. We told them what our desire was and they took that responsibility on and it’s been a great relationship over the past 22 years now. We have 20 employees.
Tom: And how many locations?
Joe: 1 location in Troy, Michigan.
Tom: What are some of the technology challenges that you were having when you brought KI Technology on board as a support company?
Joe: The major challenge that we had when we decided to upgrade our system, that's going back to about 1985, is that I wanted a single person responsible not only for the hardware but for the software as well, and the implementation, training and following support that we knew were going to need because we don't have an it department in house. So we were going to rely entirely on an outside source for all of those. We found KI was willing to do that and take on the responsibility. It started actually in a smaller way back then with just using the business functions and inventory control and billing and general ledger and some accounting functions. Since then we have incorporated all of these other things that I've mentioned using the computers in the warehouse, label system tied into it as well as improving the basic functions by adding purchasing modules and the statistical side of it from sales analysis. So we have constantly added and tweaked the system to make it more applicable for our business as it is today as compared to what it was in ‘85 and we've been able to do that with the same basic modular package that KI put together for us and just improved on it. We were driven by a customer requirement or market requirement and then we would discuss it with KI to see how our system could be adapted to this new endeavor or situation that we were in. We have subsequently had two major, that being the first one, and the second major overhaul of our hardware and now going to Windows based. Prior to that when we needed additional workstation or added any particular function we just did so randomly where it was needed but the two major projects were one the original installation and then this where we converted to the Windows based system that we have now. They were trouble free compared to the horror stories you hear of people having with computer and software installation situations they held our hand all the way through it and if a problem developed, they solved the problem and we relied entirely on their ability to do so.
Tom: And how fast did they get you up to speed on using a new Windows based system when you were so used to using a different type of system?
Joe: I think we installed on a weekend, started on a Friday night and by Monday we were functioning. Part of it is that they do a pretty thorough job and we like to do it as well, of our homework in front to know what's got to be done and then we got to do it but when their team came in the computers were ready to go all of the software was in them and everything was ready to go.
Tom: What can you do know at CarPak that you couldn't do before?
Joe: The Windows based software made it far more user friendly because everybody is accustomed to Windows today and it allowed us to integrate into our system the use of Microsoft Office and all of its functions. We can now take sales analysis information from the what’s called the KI side and I can just bring this right over into an Excel format and do any kind of analysis and function I want I can do major quotations and we have customers that will buy from 500 to 2000 different items from us we carry about 10000 stock keeping units and I can do a quotation for them so rapidly where it would just moving information from the KI side to the windows side that it's unbelievable. I mean it saves hours and hours of work in proofing and everything else.
Tom: Well that definitely shows the benefit to you and to CarPak, how does that actually benefit your customer?
Joe: Well it benefits our customer because with this analysis I can turn things around far faster for them. Some of the things that we've done for our customers with the system is incorporating a label, bar label system for certain customers who have requirements that were somewhat different than normal bar coding. These are things that made us more valuable to our customer. They’re little value-added things that I think make it more difficult for them to think about having our line shopped out to different vendors but it's something that makes the relationship that we build with our customer far deeper and more important. There's no doubt in my mind that without technology we would probably still be doing everything by hand which would be impossible. You can't turn orders around fast enough you can't price them fast enough, it's just impossible. I can't even begin to think about it you've got to have faith in technology. They're just like another department within our organization another employee. We call and say here's what we have to do or discuss the issue or the problem and see if we can come to some kind of a solution. They do it for us and drop it in the software somewhere and the next morning or 2 days later or whatever and it's ready to go. I think especially for a smaller business especially that doesn't have an it department of their own KI is the kind of company you have to find and you have to develop the kind of relationship that we've developed with them because the relationship is very important so that you know you can count on them when you need them. We've always classified KI as our actually our best vendor that we have certainly one of our oldest.
