Road Machinery LLC represents Komatsu construction and mining equipment in the US South West with a 12 branch network consisting of operations in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California.

Challenges
Tom Jensen, Road Machinery’s IT Director summarized his quest for an IT solution as follows, ”…the management team at Road Machinery, set about to find a dealer business system that would address our issues – one system that would accommodate our multi‐language, multi‐currency idiosyncrasies, address the maintenance contract opportunities and the inherent accounting complexities, as well as provide us a real‐time information system that would allow us to operate our traditional sales, service and rental operations in the most effective and efficient means possible. Meeting the requisites of SOX 404 was a ‘must do’.”

Solution
In his review of the competitive offerings, Tom was impressed with not only the eXtend product as offered by e‐Emphasys, but also with the team representing the system. “The system was not the patchwork of various systems solutions that some of the competitive products seemed to be." 

“From the corporate standpoint, I was concerned about risk to the enterprise,” Dennis Romanson, Road Machinery’s President and CEO stated. “Just about anything would have been a better system than the one we had in place. I was concerned about e‐Emphasys as a company, and eXtend as a solution. After seeing the product, meeting the team and doing the due diligence, we were willing to entrust them with, what in essence, would be our future… the system is robust; the base system has been applied by manufacturers all over the world. Untold numbers of man‐years of development have created a systems solution that is light years beyond the competitors’ systems. It more than meets the demands of our current business model and offers us untold growth potential both in terms of the accommodation of transaction volume and in terms of the increasing sophistication of our information needs.”

Results and Benefits
Tom Jensen was more than pleased with the implementation. “The e‐Emphasys implementation team was well prepared and knowledgeable with respect to the functional areas. The interaction with the functional area key users was excellent. The training and the material provided gave the end‐users confidence in the new system and took away a lot of the fear that comes with change…a great many of our employees had never been exposed to another operating system.”

Having gotten the first month‐end close under their belts, the Road Machinery/e‐Emphasys team has launched the installation of the eXtend CRM and Business Intelligence modules. According to Dennis Romanson, “…that’s where we made some real incremental gains both in terms of enhancing our marketing and support activities with our customer base, and our capabilities with respect to increasing our internal efficiencies”.

The access to information has been greatly enhanced. Gary Beal, Road Machinery’s Vice President of Sales, remarked “…it used to be a cumbersome exercise to gather information on a particular unit. We were never sure that all the costs were in place, whether there were any outstanding work orders and if all the attachments were actually attached. Under the eXtend system, I can go to one screen and all of the information is there. I can make pricing decisions immediately. Under the old system, we had to second guess our own data!”

Steve Branson, Road Machinery’s VP of Product Support, started realizing gains with respect to branch parts inventories. “eXtend allows me to set stocking parameters at all stocking points in the system. We can fine tune our inventories lower our investment and increase our response to customer needs. A powerful tool…”

Dennis Romanson added, “Our operational people are becoming comfortable with the system. Our financial folks... are chomping at the bit the get into the analytical tools that eXtend offers as part of the package. Quite frankly, we are excited. We will be able to manage more effectively and be more responsive to our customers’ needs. The CRM and BI (Business Intelligence) modules are in the process of being installed. We have just begun the conversion of our Mexican operations. The eXtend software solution will help us better manage our operations and assets. Given the current economic situation, we can use every competitive advantage we can get our hands on…”

For more information about Road Machinery, please visit http://www.roadmachinery.com/.

Click here for a PDF version of this Customer Success Story.