Rotobrush® International LLC

C AS E S TUDY
Rotobrush® International LLC
Intuitive™ ERP
Intuitive ERP Helps Rotobrush Sync Back Up
Air Duct Cleaning Leader Well-Positioned to Pursue New Business Opportunities
The Ultimate in Can-Do Spirit
You could say that the founders of Rotobrush
had the ultimate can-do spirit. Unable to
find effective
equipment to use
in their air duct
cleaning business,
they took matters
into their own
hands—literally.
They built their
own equipment.
According to David Raucher, Rotobrush’s
chief information officer, the original intent
was just to solve a specific technical obstacle
in the service business. But as other service
providers saw how well the Rotobrush
equipment performed, the company started
getting orders to make more units.
Now 15 years later, Rotobrush has
transformed itself from respected service
provider to leading business opportunity
provider, serving U.S. and international
markets.
But this strong and steady growth led
to another major business challenge for
Rotobrush. “We were growing briskly,
but our internal systems were inefficient,”
Raucher explains. “Our customer relationship
management (CRM) and enterprise resource
planning (ERP) systems couldn’t communicate
with one another.”
The lack of integration between CRM and ERP
meant that a quote on the sales side could
not automatically be converted into a sales
order on the manufacturing side. “We couldn’t
close a sale in our CRM system,” he explains.
“Instead, once the customer accepted the
quote and decided to buy a product, we had
to print out the quote and walk it over to the
customer service department, where all the
same information had to be entered again to
start the manufacturing process.”
This double-entry process was both inefficient
and error-prone. With its legacy systems,
Rotobrush had limited ability to track the
lifecycle of a customer through the sales
process, from a marketing lead to a paying
customer. The disparate systems also
prevented the company from establishing
processes for accurate and concise reporting
of key business metrics.
Superior Solution, Quick Implementation
To find a solution that corrected these
problems, Raucher met with all company
department heads and came up with a
detailed list of the capabilities that were
needed. “Our highest priority was to find a
solution that could create a quote in CRM,
seamlessly convert it to a sales order, and
then have the sales order automatically go to
manufacturing for production and shipping,”
he says. “This requirement knocked every
software vendor out of contention, except
for Intuitive and one of the top horizontal
software providers.”
Raucher says that after each company’s onsite
presentation, choosing Intuitive ERP, a
Return on Investment at a
Glance:
The implementation of an allIntuitive solution at Rotobrush
has enabled the company to grow
to the next level. The new solution
has produced the following
results:
• Eliminated the need for double
entry of sales and order
information.
• Reduced the time to close the
books on a financial period
from five weeks to one.
• Achieved new capabilities for
creating, manufacturing and
shipping custom parts.
• Achieved new ability to manage
1,600 marketing campaigns and
track all leads.
• Automating the return
merchandize authorization
inspection, saving hundreds of
manual inventory adjustments
per year.
“From the beginning, we found the Intuitive solution could be easily modified to fit our unique sales
C A S E S T U DY
process and the Intuitive implementation support team to be extremely helpful.”
— David Raucher, CIO, Rotobrush
Consona ERP solution, was easy. “The Intuitive
interface was far superior, the linkage with
our third-party marketing system was much
stronger and the solution could be easily
modified to meet our unique requirements.”
“It was critical that we have a system I could
modify to fit our business processes,” he says.
“Because our business was already successful,
I didn’t want to change our processes to fit a
new software solution.”
Speed was another major consideration.
Rotobrush signed the contract for a new allIntuitive solution in September and needed
the system to go live on January 1. “That
was a really tall order since our small IT staff
was the entire implementation team. We
had to import and scrub large amounts of
data, as well as extensively modify the CRM
capabilities to meet our specifications.”
Implementation began with the installation
of a new server and a remote installation
of an Intuitive ERP solution with specific
capabilities for sales order quote conversion,
configuration, financials, marketing and
RMA [return merchandise authorization]
inspections.
“From the beginning, we found the Intuitive
solution could be easily modified to fit
our unique sales process and the Intuitive
implementation support team to be
extremely helpful,” Raucher says.
As the January 1 go-live date approached, a
decision was made to launch the sales order
quote conversion, advanced configurator and
advanced financials capabilities on Day 1 and
the specific marketing and sales capabilities a
few months later.”
“I’ve been in software for 19 years and this
was the smoothest go-live that I have ever
had,” he says. “We went live on January 1 as
planned and had intended to test the system
for a week before using it to ship products.
But the system was working so well that by
January 3 we had processed our first order,
taken the money and shipped the product.”
Intuitive Solves Business Challenges
Implementing an all-Intuitive solution solved
several business challenges for Rotobrush.
“The quote-to-sales order conversion enabled
by Intuitive ERP has been a phenomenal
business improvement for us,” Raucher says.
“Now we can take a quote, convert it with
one mouse click to a sales order and instantly
know exactly what has to be produced
and shipped. As a result, our build is more
accurate, our purchasing is more accurate,
and we can carry less inventory because we
know exactly what we have to ship.”
“The Intuitive interface was
far superior, the linkage with
our third-party marketing
system was much stronger
and the solution could be
easily modified to meet our
unique requirements.”
— David Raucher, CIO,
Rotobrush
Before the Intuitive ERP implementation, the
company had no provision for making custom
parts. But producing custom electrostatic
filters that Rotobrush customers brand and
sell to their own customers is an important
part of the product mix. “With Intuitive
Advanced Configurator, we can create
custom parts, and the system automatically
creates a custom part number that tells the
manufacturing team exactly what to build,”
Raucher says, noting that it used to take more
time to process the paperwork for custom
orders than it did to produce the product.
The greater efficiency and accuracy Intuitive
ERP provides enabled Rotobrush to reduce
shipment errors, lower inventory costs, and
streamline RMA processes. Financial processes
are also more efficient. “Our accounting
people love Intuitive Advanced Financials,”
Raucher says. “It used to take them four to five
weeks to close out the previous month and
now they can do it in a week.”
With customer satisfaction up and business
efficiency improved, the Intuitive solution has
set the stage for Rotobrush to pursue new
lines of business. “I firmly believe that when
you buy a software package like Intuitive you
are buying into a process, not just buying
a product,” Raucher says. “The vendor and
customer must work together for the software
to be successful. In that light, working
with Intuitive has been a perfect choice for
Rotobrush.”
Intuitive
A Consona ERP Solution
12131 113th Ave NE, Suite 101
Kirkland, WA 98034
TEL (425) 250-5900
FAX (425) 814-0195
Toll Free (877) 549-2149
info@intuitivemfg.com
www.intuitivemfg.com