Serv-A-Lite Products

Serv-A-Lite Products, Inc. is a specialty hardware and fastener wholesale distributor located in East Moline, Illinois.  Established in 1979, Serv-a-Lite now employs nearly 200 sales reps that cover the entire continental United States as well as Puerto Rico and Hawaii.  Their product line is very diverse, with over 38,000 SKU's and their customer database contains over 14,000 addresses. Order entry is extremely important at Serv-a-Lite and as the company has grown, it obviously has become much more complex.

Prior to implementing Order-Stream electronic order entry, Serv-a-Lite utilized four fax machines to accommodate some 2,000 incoming fax pages per day.  These pages were manually sorted by region and then handed off to order entry clerks for keyboarding.  Some large orders would take as much as 2-3 hours to input.  Problems encountered at this stage included illegible paper orders and poor quality fax impressions that caused errors in shipping, duplicate orders and sometimes needless back orders if clerks could not correctly interpret a fax order.

Ralph Berger, Operations Manager at Serv-a-Lite,  implemented Order-Stream from SL Datakatch with a mandate to improve order entry overall, reduce costs and reduce the time lag from order taking to shipping from 4-7 days to 2 days.

Ralph used a combination of Order-Stream software and Symbol SPT1700 Palm/Scanners for each sales rep. Serv-a-Lite has noticed a phenomenal increase in productivity, a corresponding decrease in lost sales caused by errors in order entry and an overall cost reduction.