High beam

Kendeco Tool Crib shines the light on cost-savings opportunities.

Like many distributors, Kendeco Tool Crib regularly conducts tooling tests for customers. After completing the tests, an outside sales engineer develops a formal cost savings report outlining the results and the total dollars saved. In the past, the sales engineer would give the report to the customer and file a copy at Kendeco’s St. Cloud, Minn., office. (Click here for a sample report.)

Although the system worked well for many years, Kendeco management recognized that paper documents are easily misplaced or damaged. Plus, having grown to 12 outside sales engineers on staff (each charged with completing three tests per month), there was no simple way for salespeople to share test results with each another.

About two years ago, Kendeco began developing a proprietary software program that serves as a customer relationship management tool and a repository of customer test data reports. Kendeco calls the program High Beam because, like automobile headlights, High Beam helps salespeople see where they’re going so they can move faster.

Kendeco sales manager Dave TenClay says distributors perform value-added tasks for customers on a daily basis and many have a formal process for documenting their activities and sharing results with customers. What distributors often fail to do, however, is develop a system to quickly access this information and make it easily available company wide. 

When TenClay joined Kendeco in late 2003, he soon recognized that sales engineers needed a better way to store and share information.

“I realized we were obtaining lots of important technical data, but were not actively sharing it. One sales engineer was asking the same questions another sales engineer answered when he did a similar test the month before. The information was sitting on a piece of paper in a file and it wasn’t doing anyone any good. It made sense to put that information in a common database and make it available to everyone,” he says.

Today, the company is nearing its goal of equipping all outside sales engineers with wireless laptop computers so they can have 24/7 access to High Beam, which also interfaces with Kendeco’s enterprise system. Since implementing the system, sales engineers don’t need to call or return to the office to complete test reports, enter notes, check inventory or run a query for a customer.

While they’re with a customer, salespeople can pull up a test data report developed for another company and say, “This is what we saved another customer. Maybe this solution will work for you.”

For instance, if a customer is milling 300 Series stainless steel and wants to improve cycle time, the Kendeco sales engineer can enter a few keywords into the High Beam database and pull out examples of test reports Kendeco conducted in the past.

“We often get opportunities after a customer has given one of our competitors the same challenge. While they’re busy searching for an answer, our sales engineer can pull up data from High Beam on the spot and have an order in hand before our competitor has even had a chance to get back with an answer,” TenClay says.

Some veteran salespeople initially resisted the technology, but TenClay says peer pressure, and seeing how the tool made their jobs easier, won them over within a few months.

“Our talented I/S team made High Beam very user-friendly. Using High Beam, a sales engineer can report something in the field immediately. If the customer calls with an issue related to that project, our inside customer service people can look it up and immediately see what occurred that morning and follow up,” says TenClay.

He says one of the immediate benefits of instantaneous access to data is faster response time.

“It speeds up the information gathering process, which usually means getting an order.” he says.

Customers that utilize Kendeco’s Inventory Management Services also receive a password that enables them to retrieve a variety of reports, including their ordering history and usage patterns.

TenClay says High Beam helps validate Kendeco as more than a run-of-the-mill tool peddler. It opens the door for salespeople to talk about their application engineering services, Kendeco’s Inventory Management Services and other cost reduction activities.

This article was prepared exclusively for ValueAddedPartners.org. Copyright 2005.

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