I had a chance to speak with Shawn Kaelber, Director of Information Technologies at Midwest Packaging Solutions, last week about the impact MITS has had at his company.
“It is great that our sales reps no longer spend 10-20 hours per week looking at reports and searching for data on their customers. With MITS, they barely spend any time running reports—instead they get a standard set of reports updated with the most recent numbers for their customers pulled from our Infor A+ ERP.”
But what gets Shawn even more excited is the change in behavior patterns he has seen, especially with some of the less tech-savvy sales staff.
“Sure you can run reports galore in MITS. But to some extent, so what? The ‘so what’ for us has been that the data actually means something for our team. By asking the right questions, MITS gives us data that our sales rep can take to the customer.”
Shawn gave an example associated with the application of the Texas A&M customer profitability model at Midwest Packaging.
“We created reports in MITS showing the ratio of orders to deliveries, and found that in some instances we were doing too many deliveries per order. By changing the behavior of when and how orders have been delivered, we’ve been able to impact the bottom line. And from the sales reps’ point of view, this change increases the commissionable margin, meaning more money in the sales rep’s pocket too.
The vendor scorecard in MITS has also had a significant impact on behavior and results at Midwest Packaging.
“We can put the vendor scorecard in front of a vendor to show them exactly when orders were not on-time and/or sent in multiple shipments. The data is right in front of them so there isn’t anything to argue about when it comes to meeting their commitments.”
Shawn is super excited about putting more of the Texas A&M model to work at Midwest Packaging through MITS—especially cost to serve.
“Truly understanding our cost to serve will be a game changer for us.”