The Mesa Group Business and Technology Consulting

Promotional Products Distributor

Problem: The Company processes a large number of direct ship orders that require the invoice to their customer to be held until confirmation of the shipment from the supplier is received. Because of the large number of orders held for invoicing, a large manual effort was required to release the orders when the confirmation was received. Over time this created a $2 - 2.5 million dollar backlog of customer invoices over 120 days old.
Solution: The Mesa Group reviewed the process then designed and implemented several procedural and technological modifications to reduce the manual intervention in the process and automate the invoice release.
Results: The Company has eliminated their backlog and increased the daily value of released invoices by an additional $60 K.

Gear and Bearing Distributor

Problem: The Company's customers were constantly price shopping the products. The existing ERP system required a sales representative to view several screens to answer customer questions and many sales were being lost.
Solution: The Mesa Group designed, developed, and implemented a process to combine various aspects of price, availability, product substitution, and order entry/quoting into a consolidated screen.
Results: The Company has significantly reduced the time required to provide customer information and increased the numbers of sales retained due to the enhanced efficiency of the process.

Firearms Distributor

Problem: The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) requires a log that documents all movements of firearms.
Solution: The Mesa Group created a detailed ATF Log report to track the manufacturer, model, serial number, acquisition date, customer, license number, and disposition date of each firearm received or sold by the company.
Results: The Company was able to meet the regulatory requirements for pertinent information established by the federal government.

Tire Distributor

Problem: The Company is organized into four primary divisions. It has a 480,000 square foot mixing warehouse that contains tires from all divisions. Product must be received, put away, picked, and shipped within the same warehouse by location across all divisions.
Solution: The Mesa Group developed a series of modifications that allow a warehouse employee with little or no product experience to handle warehouse operations across all divisions. The modifications function with or without radio frequency equipment.
Results: The Company is able to efficiently and accurately process thousands of warehouse transactions across multiple divisions daily with far less employee training.

Vacuum Cleaner Parts Distributor

Problem: The Company processes a large volume of order that have backorder parts on them. This resulted in excess orders to manage and additional shipping costs for customers.
Solution: The Mesa Group developed and implemented an automated process that allowed sales partners to review backordered lines for a customer and cancel or move the lines forward to the current order being entered.
Results: The Company was able to continuously consolidate customer orders resulting in less management and because the backordered items now shipped as part of a current order, shipping costs were reduced. The ultimate result was reduced cost and happier customers.

Chemical Distributor

Problem: The Company employed 2½ people to handle accounts receivable and credit and were growing enough each year that the staff requirement would have continued to increase.
Solution: The Mesa Group designed, developed, and implemented an automated lockbox system which was integrated into the Company's existing ERP system.
Results: The Company was able to reassign the efforts of 1½ people from the A/R area to another department that prevented additional hiring. The Company ultimately saved more than $75 K per year while handling the increased company growth without additional hiring in the A/R area.