Stanion Wholesale Electric, Pratt, KS, got some deserved recognition from a software provider for the way it uses its customer relationship management and business intelligence systems to track value-added services. Stanion was given the 2016 Award for Best Innovation by the Tour de Force executive team for its use of Tour de Force to quantify and track value added services they provide to their customers.
Stanion has national contracts that require it to provide cost savings equal to a certain percentage of a customer’s total spending. These cost savings are achieved through the delivery of value-added services and benefits. When it came time to prepare annual cost savings reports, the team at Stanion struggled to compile the necessary information. Sales representatives and branch managers would schedule internal meetings to identify and review the services that had been delivered, meetings that involved multiple resources and would stretch into days and even weeks.
According to Dennis Guey, VP of sales at Stanion, “Using Tour de Force to manage this process has resulted in significant productivity savings. We have 17 branches and were tying up each branch for weeks at a time trying to create these reports. That has been eliminated now and our sales team doesn’t have to scramble to find this information: it’s all in Tour de Force. Since we’ve been doing this we’ve had no problems meeting our percentage of cost savings; in fact, we typically have a higher amount than what’s required. We knew we were doing it before, we just weren’t documenting it.”