Patton's

Since 1945, Patton's Inc. of Charlotte, North Carolina has been supplying the most efficient and reliable compressed air, vacuum, piping, process cooling, paint spray booth and blower systems available. Specializing in solutions for the manufacturing, automotive and hospital industries, Patton's takes pride in its ability to provide the correct system on every project. Expert guidance and attention to detail assures that a Patton's system will satisfy their customer's requirements along with saving them time and money.

The company was founded weeks after the Allied victory in World War II to install hydraulic lifts, meters and related equipment for gasoline service stations and fuel oil delivery trucks. The company was soon rebranded by changing its name to Patton's as the business shifted its emphasis to selling compressed air solutions, mainly to the thriving textile and plastics manufacturing industries of the post-war American south. Patton's business grew rapidly, winning hundreds of accounts and establishing itself as the region's leading Quincy compressor distributor.

Concurrent with its successes in the industrial market space, Patton's began selling custom medical air packages to hospitals in 1980. As this facet of the business grew, Patton's created a wholly owned subsidiary, Patton's Medical in 2008 to sell and service its own line of medical gas equipment nationwide. Patton's Medical is staffed with some of the best in the medical gas business with extensive backgrounds in sales, marketing, manufacturing, engineering and customer service.

Today, Patton's employs over 150 dedicated people who support thousands of compressed air installations including service, parts, installation and custom designed solutions. Patton's has seven full-service branch locations and seven service centers strategically located in the states of Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia. Over 85 service technicians are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to offer parts and service on all major brands of air compressors and dryers whenever the customer needs it.

Understanding the importance of customer relationships and providing the best equipment and supplies to meet its customer's needs, Patton's is highly regarded as a leader in its industry.

Patton's Succeeds with Technology

Technology has long played a key role in Patton's success. In 1982, the company commissioned a computer programmer to write a Business Basic application to automate key business processes such as accounting, inventory, order entry and service/repair. However, as time passed and their consultant looked forward to retirement, Patton's knew that it would have to make a change. In 2002, John Patton and other decision makers met with E&A's Tom Cangelosi and Jeff Sprowls to discuss Patton's go-forward information technology strategy. Other packages considered at that time included Sage MAS 500 which was represented from a competitor in the Charlotte area.

E&A's solution featured Infor ERP TakeStock, a software system designed to help distributors of all types run efficient, end-to-end operations. Recognizing the overall value proposition offered by E&A with its TakeStock solution and its technical resources, Patton's rewarded E&A with a contract to install TakeStock. Tom would manage the project for E&A from its local office in Atlanta, Georgia. As the project unfolded, E&A's personnel would become intimately familiar with Patton's business processes, enabling them to tailor the TakeStock system to satisfy Patton's unique business needs.

Jed Patton, who represents the third generation of Patton family management, worked closely with E&A on the TakeStock implementation. Understanding the limitations of the legacy system, Jed wrote most of the internal procedures to describe how Patton's might improve its business processes. "The old system was very labor intensive and relied on a lot of manual processes. To cite just one example, previously we would have to hand-write every part before entering an order into the computer. Since it's not unusual for us to have five, six or more pages of parts on an order, we lost many hours of labor on non-productive, repetitive tasks," he explained.

Months of hard work resulted in a successful implementation of TakeStock. Patton's enjoyed an immediate, positive benefit. "TakeStock was a huge step forward for us," recalled Jed. "The amount of work that we have been able to do with TakeStock has translated into a tremendous increase in our efficiency. There's no question about that."

TakeStock has unified Patton's sales, customer service and service/repair units to better collaborate by increasing accessibility to critical business information. TakeStock's powerful Progress database stores a wealth of data about Patton's customers, including past purchases, credit, equipment maintenances, and other vital information. With TakeStock, Patton's has been able to eliminate many redundant, manual processes while streamlining its business functions and improving service to customers.

For example, Patton's has used TakeStock to improve its customer service metrics through improved access to information. "We pride ourselves on saving our customers money by having our technicians arrive on the job site with the right parts to fix their machine," said Jed. "We can't expect our customers to fully understand what might be at fault with causing a particular problem when they phone in for support, but we can use TakeStock to identify the specific equipment the customer may be using. We can match the customer with the custom parts kits we've developed for the various lines of equipment we sell and service. These kits are stocked to fit a range of machines or models that might share parts in common; allowing us, in most cases, to make the repair on the first visit. This improves the customer's bottom line and avoids the hassle of scheduling a follow up visit to make the repair."

Moreover, Patton's has better control over how it manages the kits. "Typically, the technician uses maybe two or three parts out of the hundred or so in the kit to do the repair," continued Jed. "The remainder goes back into inventory when the kit is refilled. Before implementing TakeStock, we would rely on hand-written notes to replenish the kits, which was an error prone and time consuming process. Today, the flow of paper is a lot easier! All of the parts that were used to make the repair are entered into TakeStock where we can see exactly what needs to be purchased to replenish that particular kit."

Patton's Gets More from Service & Repair

Jed explained that Patton's staff of factory-trained service and repair professionals has set the company apart from the competition, offering a level of service that few in the industry can match. "To keep good help, we need to pay our service technicians well," said Jed. "Consequently, keeping our labor utilization rates high and ensuring a steady stream of service work is vitally important."

To that end, E&A integrated a third-party service and repair module with TakeStock. This software allows Patton's to track its customer's equipment utilization and schedule preventive maintenance services at just the right time. In this manner, Patton's can match the predicted level of workflow with its staffing levels, benefiting the company's bottom line, employees and customers.

"A lot of our competitors do service work when it's not really due," commented Jed. "Patton's philosophy is to help our customers save money by scheduling service calls for their equipment at the hourly intervals recommended by the manufacturer; and then by changing only those parts that are necessary at that time. E&A's solution allows us to calculate when customer site visits should be scheduled and generates a report that we can review weeks before the next month of work begins. We can then allocate staff to specific tasks while leaving room for direct phone calls from customers for emergency repairs." Jed added that with the current labor utilization rate approaching 90 percent, Patton's is earning a reasonable profit by making good use of its human resources while providing a valuable service to its customers.

Patton's customary use of non-binding maintenance agreements allows its customers to cancel at any time if they do not perceive the value of the company's services. "Rarely do we lose a customer," said Jed. "Our local technicians have built durable, long-term relationships with our customers, who have come to recognize Patton's as a respected partner who supports their success as best we can."

Jed likewise gives E&A high marks for designing and implementing Patton's integrated TakeStock and service/repair solution. "E&A communicated well throughout this project," praised Jed. "E&A has consistently produced quality work for us in a timely manner. E&A has helped us get to where we are today."

Patton's Benefits from E&A Managed Services

In 2006, Ken Litaker was introduced as E&A's new director of Managed Services at an E&A user group in Atlanta. Joe Pool and Debbie Bethune were intrigued with Ken's presentation on how deploying an E&A managed services solution could reduce Patton's information technology (IT) total cost of ownership while simultaneously providing for a more secure and reliable computing environment. Joe and Debbie brought the message back to Jed, who arranged a meeting with Ken for further discussion.

"Ken talked to me about the rather cumbersome tape backup system we had in place at that time," recalled Jed. "I came to realize how vulnerable we were in the event of a catastrophic failure and decided to take steps to improve the situation."

Patton's soon decided to implement an E&A managed services solution to continuously monitor and backup its mission-critical equipment including the TakeStock server. Over time, Patton's has expanded the service to place more of its IT assets under E&A managed services' care. E&A's solution provides Patton's with greater peace-of-mind knowing that its systems are maintained while its business data is regularly backed up and stored offsite for safekeeping and rapid restoration. Importantly, these systems are monitored in a 24/7/365 network operations center (NOC) where irregularities are reported to E&A technicians for review and corrective action, when necessary.

"It's worry-free to us," said Jed. "We love the security of having snapshots of our system taken throughout the day and sending these backups offsite for retrieval whenever we might need them. And if anything unusual occurs, E&A's managed services group is immediately calling on the phone or sending an email to alert us about any potential ramifications and how we might deal with them."

Jed cited a recent episode in which one of Patton's servers began to experience major problems as proof of E&A's value. "E&A reported that one of our servers was having some registry errors due to a corrupted hard drive," said Jed. "E&A virtualized the server onto a new machine so that we could take the server offline to do some diagnostics and recondition the machine. E&A then used a backup copy to restore everything once the repair was complete. Throughout this process, we didn't skip a beat in running our business as usual," remarked Jed.

"Ken and Randy Moore have proven invaluable to us," continued Jed. "E&A is a resource whom we can trust to apply proven managed services solutions that are designed to address our everyday business challenges."

E&A Develops an Online Sales Portal for Patton's Medical

With the TakeStock, service/repair and managed services solutions firmly in place and delivering solid results, Patton's wondered how it might be able to leverage its technology investments to do even more. Fortunately, a breakthrough idea for dramatically improving Patton's Medical business processes came from two of its own, savvy computer end users. Jed shared the story with us.

"Once upon a time, we hired two ladies named Cathy," said Jed. "Working from a remote office in the Midwest, the Cathy's recognized the potential for us to develop an Internet-based system where our field salespeople would be empowered to generate quotes for our customers. We transcribed the Cathy's vision into a document that described in detail the functionality we wanted, and then passed it onto E&A."

The solution articulated by Patton's would provide authorized Internet users with secure access to the TakeStock database. Patton's supports many dozens of its own salespeople as well as manufacturer's representatives located across the country who bid on hundreds of jobs every year, ranging from the simple to the complex. Varying from a $2,000 sale of a five-horsepower air compressor to a $500,000+ installation of an 'octoplex' machine featuring eight compressors configured to work as one, these projects may or may not include hundreds of related parts and equipment on an individual order. Therefore, a major challenge would be to develop a solution that was both easy-to-use and had the requisite programming logic to configure related parts and equipment on the same order; and thus ensure that Patton's would sell compatible items every time.

E&A's Jennifer Jones and Carl Stone worked closely with Jed on the project. "Jennifer and Carl got to work and created a custom-written quote system for us based on TakeStock's Internet InterLink module," said Jed. "It was unbelievable how fast they put it together and how well it works!"

Now, Patton's Medical direct salespeople and manufacturer's representatives can login to TakeStock from the Internet to rapidly build quotes for their customers. E&A's application helps users navigate through Patton's 30,000 plus database to the exact product they might be looking for in a few easy steps. Crucially, once the bid has been accepted by the customer, the quote is automatically converted to a purchase order, creating a manufacturing ticket detailing the bill of materials needed to fulfill the order. This seamless process saves Patton's untold labor hours in data entry work while providing the utmost in convenience for its salespeople; and in turn, helping Patton's stay more competitive and win more business.

"The efficiency is unbelievable!" exclaimed Jed. "Judging by the number of quotes and orders we've processed, we'd have to employ at least two full time data entry people to enter all that stuff into TakeStock. Meanwhile, our sales force benefits from gaining access to self-service tools, enabling them to get all the current pricing and product information they need without phoning in for assistance."

Jed reckons that it only takes about thirty minutes to train a salesperson to competently use the application, which he believes testifies to the care and professionalism that Jennifer and Carl have put into designing the system. "It's that well built," stressed Jed. "And over the year since we have rolled out the application, E&A has continued to refine the system, creating what we feel is a true masterpiece of computer programming."

Vacuum equipment available from Patton's Medical

Looking Ahead

Patton's plans to evaluate technologies and services that can help the company maintain its competitive advantage. For example, Patton's is currently taking a close look at the SmartStyle cloud computing solution from E&A in order to gain significant cost advantages and security when compared with hosting a physical computing environment on its own premises. And of course, Patton's will continue to refine its core TakeStock system to improve its business processes and deliver greater value to its customers.

Jed summed up the positive working relationship that has developed between E&A and Patton's. "The answer when I call E&A about an issue or to discuss a possible upgrade is always 'Yes, that can be done', said Jed. "E&A is the most responsive business partner we have."

To learn more about Patton's, visit their web site at www.pattonsinc.com and the Patton's Medical web site at www.pattonsmedical.com.