Sports Advantage

Since 1983, Mid-America Sports Advantage (‘Sports Advantage’) of Jasper, Indiana has been passionate about supplying high quality field maintenance equipment and sporting goods. Sports Advantage products are designed to bring out the best in each player and grow with their customer’s teams over time.

Sports Advantage was founded by Mike Schmitt, Sr. an entrepreneur who owned and operated the popular smorgasbord restaurant Heritage Inn among other business ventures in the town of Jasper.  Mike, who had also made an investment in the United Clay Company, thought that he might remarket an excess supply of that company’s Pure Line brand of calcium carbonate to groundskeepers for use on local athletic fields such as baseball diamonds, football and soccer fields. Operating out of an office in the restaurant and renting a third party warehouse to stock the bags of marking chalk, Mike launched the business. Initially, Mike and his wife, Francine sold to parks and schools located in Indiana and sorrounding states.  However, as word of mouth spread and catalog distribution increased, Sports Advantage sales soon expanded & sales went nationwide.  

Success allowed Mike to sell his interest in the Heritage Inn to focus solely on Sports Advantage, purchasing land, building and office space dedicated to the enterprise. Mike’s daughter Denise Schmitt Kemker recalled how the company’s product line evolved organically with sales. “Customers asked for items related to what they were already getting from us,” said Denise. “For example, if they were a chalk customer they might ask, ‘Do you have Diamond Dry? Do you have paint?’ And so on. It made intuitive sense for us to stock all of the things our customers were asking for.” Popular facilities and field maintenance equipment such as aerators, drags and rakes as well as bases, fence caps and soil amendments soon became standard stock items.  In time, the Sports Advantage catalog would feature a broad array of sporting goods including practice balls, safety masks, foul poles, windscreen, baseball equipment, baseball and softball training aids, basketball equipment, pitching machines and more.

Today, Sports Advantage sells across North America and dozens of countries worldwide where U.S. military bases are located. A few of the company’s customers include the Chicago Park District, Indiana University, St. Louis Cardinals, Tampa Bay Devil Rays, the set of Suite Life on Deck (a popular children’s television program) and tens of thousands more. Along the way, Sports Advantage has become known as the dominant player in the field maintenance industry by supplying quality products at affordable prices.

Denise shared the philosophy that has served the company so well. “My father enjoys face to face interactions with our customers and learning as much as he can about what they need,” said Denise. “He always says, ‘You’ve only got one boss, and it’s not me, Mike Jr, or Denise. It’s the customer. If we do what we need to do to take care of the customer, everything else will work out fine’.”

Sports Advantage outgrows its computer system

Technology has played a key role in helping Sports Advantage achieve its goals. For example, computerized direct mail marketing has long been a cornerstone of Sports Advantage's growth strategy. When Denise joined the company in 1993, she diligently began to accumulate lists of prospective buyers in order to rapidly build the prospect database. "We inundated our software system with addresses!" affirmed Denise. "For example, we might obtain a book of athletic directors and coaches in a particular state as a result of our participation in a local trade show. We would return to the office, sit in front of the computer and enter the addresses into our system. We kept at it. Our database grew and grew."

Meanwhile, Mike’s son, Mike Schmitt, Jr. entered the business in 1994 with the goal of accelerating the company’s sales. With Mike’s leadership, the sales collateral became ever more sophisticated.  From its humble origins as a simple one-page, three-fold sales flier for marking chalk, to a 30 page two-color catalog, the Sports Advantage mail piece steadily evolved into a full-color 164-page catalog featuring thousands of items for sale. In a few short years, the Sports Advantage message would reach many tens of thousands of qualified buyers across the nation and overseas.  As a result of these savvy sales and marketing efforts, the Sports Advantage grew at a triple digit rate for three consecutive years in the late 1990s and continued to grow at double digit rates well into the 2000’s.

Accompanying this explosive growth came concern about maintaining the outstanding level of service that Sports Advantage customers had come to expect. Management made the sound business decision to greatly expand the company's physical plant and to more than triple the number of employees from six in the early 1990s to over twenty by the end of the decade. However, it soon become clear that the legacy SBT accounting software would no longer be up to the task of supporting the information processing needs of the business. "By 2003, we knew we had outgrown SBT," said Denise. "There were times when invoices were backlogged two to three weeks because the software was locked up. We were in a tough situation because the company where our help desk contact had worked was acquired and we had problems contacting him. Worse, there was no bar coding; our inventory counts were always off; and we had difficulty accessing the kind of information we needed to make good decisions," she reminisced.

Understanding both the importance of the technical support relationship and the value inherent in a software designed specifically for the distribution industry, Denise led the Sports Advantage search for a new information technology solution. Denise looked at over twenty different software products before whittling it down to two. The finalists included Infor10 Distribution Business (SX.enterprise) represented by Lynn Fisher at Earnest & Associates ('E&A') in Springfield, Illinois. Impressed by the overall value proposition of a nationally-recognized software backed by local sales, consulting services and technical support, Denise and the Sports Advantage team awarded their business to E&A in July, 2004.

Sports Advantage implements SX.enterprise

With E&A's guidance and assistance, Sports Advantage implemented a 25 user SX.enterprise solution in the latter part of 2004. Denise credits E&A's consulting, implementation and technical support team of Brady Bibb, Blake Cunningham, Cindy Guy and Leo Lang with making the installation a pain-free experience. "We worked with E&A to make decisions about how Infor Distribution Enterprise would be adapted to our unique business needs," said Denise. "Fortunately, E&A had developed a road map that detailed everything we needed to do to get setup properly. We simply followed along the check list!"

E&A assisted with the set up of a test system where Sports Advantage employees could acquaint themselves with Infor Distribution Enterprise and make decisions on how to set system parameters to align with their business needs. "There were a lot of days spent with computers in our break room to work on the setup," recalled Denise. "If we had questions about, say, how to set up AR thresholds or inventory tables, we'd call E&A to discuss industry best practices. We found that E&A's experience working with other distributors was helpful in implementing the business processes that were best suited for our company. Overall it was a very smooth process."

The project included several modifications to Infor Distribution Enterprise. E&A wrote a modification in the Integrated Bar Code (IBC) module that allows end users to repeatedly scan an item in order to enter the quantity desired, overriding the default setting which had been deemed inefficient. E&A created another mod to consolidate the invoicing in a manner that works well for Sports Advantage but supersedes the standard consolidated invoicing feature found in later versions of SX.enterprise. Later, a modification for managing inventory items that have a variety of size and color combinations was implemented. In this latter case, E&A's solution automatically creates inventory records from the selection of a single core item, saving the headache of manually creating separate inventory records for all of the size and color combinations that may be possible.

SX.enterprise benefits Sports Advantage

SX.enterprise empowers distributors like Sports Advantage to master issues critical to their business including accounting, inventory, purchasing, customer service and more. Since the go-live, Sports Advantage has enjoyed numerous benefits across the enterprise.

Customer Service

Customer service is at the core of the value proposition offered at Sports Advantage.  A staff of eight sales associates use SX.enterprise to process an average of one to two hundred orders every business day which arrive via phone, fax, email, trade show transactions, and the web. “With SX.enterprise we’re able to enter a higher volume of orders in a shorter period of time,” said Denise. “With over 100,000 print catalogs in circulation and dozens of new customers finding us every day on the Web, the first thing we need to do is locate the customer in the database. We like that the lookup feature in SX.enterprise is very fast and easy to use. As a rule, our sales associates can verify the contact information and check to see if there are others with whom we might have dealt with in the past from that same organization. Because we can do this rapidly, we can update the database as we go along. This is really a great thing for us because it helps improve accuracy when we distribute catalogs to our customers at the end of the year.”

Sales associate Sarah Jarboe discussed how SX.enterprise helps her get more work done is less time than before.  “Looking up customers is a lot easier to do in SX.enterprise,” said Sarah. “The name, zip code and phone number fields enable us to find exactly what we’re looking for.  Customer quotes can be converted to orders with the push of a button.  We can generate purchase orders for non-stock items without ever having to exit the order entry screen, and we can seamlessly fax and e-mail documents from within the application.”

Access to a rich trove of information associated with each customer account has allowed Sports Advantage to provide exceptional support services while helping to minimize labor costs.  “Although coaches and groundskeepers pretty much stay the same, turnover does happen occasionally,” said Denise. “We might get a call, ‘Hi, I’m new here and don’t know exactly where to begin.’ Our sales associates can use SX.enterprise to link to the account’s past purchase history and use that information to help the customer make an intelligent buying decision; whereas before we would have to physically step away from the phone to retrieve that information from a file cabinet.  The hours we have saved are significant,” she concluded.

System administrator Mike Kemker compared and contrasted the overall productivity levels of the sales unit before and after SX.enterprise.  “When we had SBT, the system was difficult for our sales associates to use.  They were working incredible amounts of overtime with over one hundred hours in a single pay period!” said Mike. “Now that we’ve implemented SX.enterprise we’ve been able to cut the hours back.  Even as our business has grown, we’ve actually reduced the number of sales hours. In fact, we were able to implement a ‘no overtime’ policy approximately two years ago with resounding success.  We’ve grown and saved money at the same time. That’s made us more profitable as a company.”

Thanks in part to the efficiencies gained through E&A’s solution, Sports Advantage is well-positioned to provide the kind of value-added services its competitors can only dream about. “We like to help our customers solve their unique field maintenance challenges,” said Denise. “Many customers have questions about their field surface playability, for example in the case of a football field where the grass isn’t growing or a baseball field that has a lot of standing water. We might ask the customer to take a soil sample, send it to us and allow us to perform an analysis. We’ll take a look at the particular way the sand, silt and clay is mixed and discuss what might be done to remedy the situation, including a visit to the customer site, if necessary. That’s an expertise that only a select few have but one that we absolutely do provide to our customers,” claimed Denise.

Inventory Management

Efficiently processing customer orders, of course, is only the beginning. Sports Advantage maintains a 35,000 square foot warehouse attached to its office in Jasper with two additional warehouses rented directly across the street and on the other side of town. To utilize these resources wisely, it is important for Sports Advantage managers to accurately predict demand and stock the right products; as well as pick, pack and ship customer orders as quickly and efficiently as possible. 

Operations manager Ken Brelage chatted with us about how SX.enterprise helps Sports Advantage maximize the value it gets from its suppliers.  “We have taken advantage of the user-definable custom fields in SX.enterprise to enable us to make better purchasing decisions,” said Ken. “It’s important for us to look carefully at every item because we can save significant amounts of money by taking advantage of buying targets including discounts and free freight.” 

Ken explained that in a business closely tied to outdoor sports such as baseball and softball, demand for certain product groups can fluctuate dramatically from month to month.  “We are seasonal,” confirmed Ken. “We’ve designed a three year purchasing report that looks at seasonal demand including a safety stock report that assesses the expected demand for the next 90 days. When our stock level reaches 20 percent then we know we need to make a purchasing decision.  We try to stay ahead of the game,” said Ken.

The IBC module in SX.enterprise as proven key to helping Sports Advantage increase visibility into its warehouse and improve its business processes.  Leveraging Radio Frequency (RF) technology, IBC allows workers to use hand-held devices to accurately manage the flow of materials in and out of the warehouse.  “The bar code system has made a world of difference,” enthused Denise. “Now we are organized!”

Inbound shipments are scanned using bar code labels for immediate validation of the purchase order and then assigned bin locations.  Every night, picking documents are sent to the warehouse using the SX.enterprise picking logic. The next morning, the picker/packer uses the RF terminal to confirm the accuracy of the orders being shipped. The use of bar code labels in lieu of manual data entry virtually eliminates the costs and associated loss of customer goodwill that might otherwise result from shipping mistakes, which have all but disappeared since implementing SX.enterprise.

Mike Kemker highlighted how SX.enterprise works with his own custom programs to vastly improve the physical inventory process.  “The change in how we conduct our physical inventories tells the story,” said Mike.  “Before, we would start inventory on a Friday and work through Sunday. It was painful and yet our numbers were off the mark by huge amounts.  Now, we can conduct an inventory in a day and a half during normal working hours with only negligible discrepancies in the dollar value of our inventory.  It’s not bad!” 

Denise also discussed how improved visibility made possible by the bar code system has helped Sports Advantage improve its customer relationships; with the additional benefit of lightening their sales associates’ workload.  “At the shipping station we simply scan the order using the IBC bar code,” said Denise. “The information is sent to FedEx where an email is automatically sent to the customer’s email address. That is a great feature because the customer knows instantly that their shipment is on the way.  And it reduces the number of inbound callers with routine inquiries about their shipments because all of the information is available for self-service viewing online.”

Accounting and Finance

Unlike many competitive products, SX.enterprise is a true ERP product in the sense that exceptional industry-specific functionality is thoroughly integrated with a robust accounting and finance system that pleases the most demanding end users.

Denise discussed how she has gained proficiency managing the accounting and financial aspects of Sports Advantage using SX.enterprise and E&A's support services. "When I started with Infor SX.enterprise, I had never done the month end closes before," said Denise. “I expected the worst because the month end’s with SBT had been so difficult; we would routinely be four to six months behind.  But now it’s wonderful! The month end’s are closed on time and everything balances correctly.  There are small rounding discrepancies each month, but that’s easy to adjust and if there are a few entry errors that cause an out of balance condition and I can’t figure it out, I can call Cindy. She is great at explaining what to do!”

Sports Advantage has become accustomed to having better control of its G/L with SX.enterprise.  “We used to have our accountant look at all of our adjusting G/L entries,” continued Denise. “Now I just send over the trial balance and financial reports to her at the beginning of the month.  I normally have a few small adjustments, and when done, I resend the reports again to her for a final review. It’s very painless most of the time but if we have an issue we can call Cindy to help me get it worked out and move on.”

Cindy Guy commented, “Denise’s general ledger is perfect! The balancing history available in SX.enterprise allows her to correct for the slightest differences between the G/L and the transactions in AR, AP and inventory.  We know the customer is doing a good job when they call us to help locate an out-of-balance inventory in the amount of only $1.20.  That’s progress!” she exclaimed.

Open computing helps the pool truck get on the road

The ‘pool truck’ program remains an important and highly symbolic legacy project at Sports Advantage. Originating from Mike, Sr.’s early days selling marking chalk and Diamond Dry, the pool truck is designed to make these kinds of heavy, bulky products more affordable by splitting the associated transportation costs among the largest group of customers possible. 

Mike Kemker shared how Sports Advantage manages the pool truck program using Infor Distribution Enterprise. “We start taking pool truck orders from December through the second week in February with deliveries from mid-February to mid-April,” said Mike. “We setup two user-defined fields in SX.enterprise to identify the larger customers who could order 120 bags or more and serve as destination points; and others who would be willing to travel to local destinations to pick up their orders. It’s a simple process for our sales associates to capture and record this information when they are on the phone with customers.”

With many dozens of pool truck stops scheduled in the states of Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan and Tennessee the process of calculating truck delivery routes had always been a complicated and time-consuming process.  “My dad used maps, push pins and rubber bands,” said Denise. “There would be tables stretched out all across the conference room. It would take months to figure out!  But now it’s simplified.”

Mike Kemker’s ingenious solution took advantage of the open database connectivity features of SX.enterprise to simplify the task and thereby save Sports Advantage managers countless hours of labor.  “We pull the information out of SX.enterprise,” explained Mike. “The data populates a third-party database that is integrated with Google Earth. Using this database, we can schedule everything in just one sitting.” 

Mike went on to describe how the software maps all of the stops on the route along with the SX.enterprise extract data including customer information, products, weights and quantities. The solution enables Sports Advantage to schedule the most efficient routes by more accurately calculating the per bag shipping costs of each shipment.  “The application even increments the weights on each truck so that we don’t overload,” said Mike. “We save the route, map it, print the directions and schedule the driver’s entire day from start to finish.” 

Sports Advantage progresses with technology

Mike Kemker discussed how the Progress® database’s advanced Cache-Forward™ Architecture has simplified the task of administering the SX.enterprise server.  “Progress is pretty rock solid,” said Mike. “In six years with SX.enterprise we haven’t lost a single hour of order entry.  Zero!” emphasized Mike.

Mike likes that he is able to plunge into the SX.enterprise database in order to distribute information just the way Sports Advantage needs it.  “The flexibility of the database is fantastic!” said Mike.  “We like to run our own custom sales reports by querying the Progress database.  For example, we might want to find out, ‘What is the inventory trend for this item?’ or ‘What did Indiana do last month?’ and etc.  In the past, we would have to open up the file cabinets, sort out the documents, write the numbers on a piece of paper and put it all into a spreadsheet.  It would take days!  Now we can extract that information from SX.enterprise  and hand the list over to the sales manager on demand, whenever he needs it.”

Another example of where open access to information has benefited Sports Advantage pertains to its management of purchase orders (PO’s).  Sports Advantage stocks most popular catalog items but chooses to drop ship larger, more expensive items such as pitching machines to help keep its inventory expenses under control.  Therefore it is not unusual for the sales staff to generate dozens of PO’s for special order items every day.

To make sure that customer expectations associated with these special orders are fulfilled, Sports Advantage has added several custom fields to SX.enterprise that help track quote conversions and PO aging. Using additional tools that Mike Kemker has implemented, Sports Advantage is alerted by email every evening about all of the pending PO’s in the queue.  “We’ve built a background process that checks for PO’s,” said Mike. “We used to have PO’s sit out there for six months, but today practically none of our PO’s ever gets missed.”

Mike credits the consultative services E&A has provided for helping him learn how to get more from his ERP system.  “When I started with SX.enterprise I didn’t know a lot about business rules,” said Mike. “But after working with E&A on the data conversion from SBT to SX.enterprise I learned so much about how the system churns. Now I can get all of the information from SX.enterprise that Sports Advantage needs.”

Recent Projects

Sports Advantage is continually discovering new ways to use technology to further distance itself from the competition.  In 2007, Sports Advantage decided to make a major investment in its online marketing program to include a redesign of its web site; improved shopping cart features; an advertising campaign through Google AdWords; and monthly email marketing campaigns.  The result has been extremely positive: online sales have doubled year-over-year from 2009 to 2010; with sales to individual consumers now comprising the fastest-growing segment of the Sports Advantage customer base. 

As this facet of the business grows, Sports Advantage will likely explore ways of importing the online orders with SX.enterprise. Sports Advantage hopes to improve efficiency and avoid the errors associated with the manual keying of orders, which are critical e-commerce success factors.  “The web shopper has a different mentality than someone ordering on the phone,” stressed Denise. “The expectation is that the customer will get it sent tomorrow, no matter what. So we need to look over our web orders the same day. We want to make sure these orders are released no more than 24 hours after they have been received.”

Also in 2007, Sports Advantage acquired Osborne Innovative Products (OIP), manufacturer of the most trusted baseball/softball pitcher safety screens. Denise marveled at how well SX.enterprise was able to account for Sports Advantage’ transition to a multi-company operation.  “We created a whole second company in SX.enterprise for OIP,” said Denise.  “We do some light value added manufacturing for some of the components and import other parts we need from overseas.  All of the final assembly work is performed in Jasper. In SX.enterprise, we simply entered the vendors to track our purchases of raw materials and setup Sports Advantage as OIP’s sole customer to buy the finished goods.” 

In September 2009, Sports Advantage turned to E&A’s Tammy Davis for assistance on an upgrade of SX.enterprise from version 5.0 to 5.5.  Tammy’s proposal was accepted in short order by Sports Advantage and work scheduled soon thereafter.  The care with which the system had been previously configured and supported paid dividends as the total project was completed in a timely manner with virtually no impact on current processing. “It was a breeze!” said Denise. “We made a concerted effort that lasted only about two weeks. We went live on December 1, 2009 and had every minor issue ironed out before year end. Ever since then we’ve been on a roll with SX.enterprise!”

The bottom line

Mike Kemker summed up the bottom line for Sports Advantage since the time it partnered with E&A on the Infor Distribution Enterprise solution. "In 2004, we had been growing very fast as a company. We were afraid that we wouldn't be able to keep up!" said Mike. "Since the implementation of SX.enterprise in 2004 to the end of 2010, we have nearly doubled in sales volume but we have added virtually no overhead costs to our operations. Our competitors hate us because we can sell at margins that no one else can match. We have become a price leader in our market! That's the difference that E&A and SX.enterprise has made for us."

To learn more about Sports Advantage, go to www.sportsadvantage.com.