DDI System has announced that KIE Supply selected the Inform Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software solution. KIE Supply deployed Inform to all five of its branches earlier this year to meet growing business demand and better serve customers.

 

DDI System's 100 percent U.S.-based development, implementation and support teams were a strong selling feature for the irrigation, plumbing, electrical, and lighting supplier. Coupled with Inform's superior blend of rich features, KIE's Amelia Kittson trusted the software would strengthen purchasing and warehouse practices, provide even better service to KIE's customers, and offer the mobile technology needed to elevate performance across the board.

 

Kittson's vision of where she wanted KIE to go in the future meant it needed to move away from its home-grown system. As the marketing director and ERP system transition lead, Kittson said she felt having one person handle everything to do with technology was not sustainable.

 

"I wasn't prepared to put all of our eggs in one basket. When we decided it was time to make the switch, I flew all over evaluating systems and looking at who our contacts were using. Through our buying group acquaintances, we were introduced to several similar businesses running on Inform. We got a real-life view of how the system operates and within 9 months, we had decided DDI was the right fit for KIE," said Kittson.

 

To further support their decision, Kittson surveyed her team to identify the most important factors they needed to be successful. "The number one thing everyone required was a system that would be easy to cross train different team members on. As a business owner, I never want to have one person being able to do a job. It's incredibly important to me that we can jump in whenever we need to and the tools we use everyday to run our business be powerful but also intuitive. We definitely got that with DDI's Inform," said Kittson.

 

When it came to the price for the system, Kittson expected to have to pay a high price to get the features the company needed. "We really came in expecting to have to spend millions of dollars and be 'nickeled and dimed' for everything. But that was not the case at all with DDI. We got the benefit of a very accessible company that gave us a 'local' feel with the industry expertise a business like ours required. We liked that Inform was a universal system and used terminology everyone in our company could understand. We weren't having to learn a whole new language to run our business," added Kittson.

 

For more than 60 years, KIE has been dedicated to helping customers succeed in all of their irrigation, plumbing, electrical, and lighting projects. Its mission to operate under honest business practices and to provide what customers need, when they need it, has driven company success since 1955. 

 

In addition, Kittson believes in continuing the drive toward efficiency—which includes transitioning to a paperless operation. 

 

"In just the past six months, we've made HUGE strides towards our goal of going paperless. We've eliminated file cabinets, gained space and our staff no longer has to dig through boxes of closed files. We no longer have to keep hard copies of every single invoice and we can view electronic signatures for all our orders using electronic signature capture. Our Sales Manager has been waiting for 20 years for something like that and it just was not something we had the ability to do in our legacy system," she said. 

 

KIE's decision to transform its business with DDI's Inform ERP has allowed KIE Supply to keep up with the shift in buyer behavior and continue to deliver on ever-evolving customer expectations.

 

"KIE Supply has a long history of delivering amazing customer service and we're honored they chose DDI Systems' Inform ERP to continue supporting their drive for success," said Barbara Jagoe, COO at DDI. "DDI's 26 year history of serving wholesale distributors, will undoubtedly prove valuable in helping KIE optimize processes, improve efficiency, and simplify transactions while uniting the outstanding teams across all locations."

 

To learn more about DDI System's Inform ERP Software for wholesale distributors, visit www.ddisystem.com or call 877-599-4334 to schedule a personalized demonstration.