Bears Distributing

Exclusively serves the child and adult care industry in Massachusetts and New Hampshire by providing food, produce, paper goods, cleaning products, and arts & crafts.

Click here to visit the Bears Distributing Website

NECS Customer Since:

1994

NECS Software Used:

entree Version 3
entree.NET
entree.PTV

"A full-featured reliable product, responsive customer support from a tenured staff and a close knit community of customers who share experiences are key indicators that NECS is a strong company"

Steve Gramann, General Manager, Bears Distributing

The Situation

In the 1980s entrée served the majority of Bears Distributing's day-to-day operating needs. Then, sales reps called or faxed PO’s into an order desk where they were entered into entrée . Today sales reps use entrée.DSR for order entry into the entrée system from their laptops through VPN connectivity.

Their Latest Challenge

entrée provides Bears Distributing with new advantages from features discovered as they gain proficiency with entrée. Bears Distributing wants to make sure that they continue to exploit every beneficial feature.

The Solution

Bears Distributing exploits entrée’s easy to use Help query and contacts other entrée customers to learn about their experience with compelling features and modules. For example, Bears learned how to process soft drink deposits so that when shells are delivered, the customer is invoiced for the deposit and when the shell is returned a credit is issued. They also learned how to use entree.PTV to automate entitlements for school systems using the Pass Through Value method. The most recent additions to Bear’s entrée suite include entree.DOC for scanning invoices and entree.NET for customers who prefer to enter orders online.

Results

Just about everyone at Bears Distributing benefits from using entrée including sales reps, drivers, accountants, managers, shipping, receiving and warehouse staff.

Inventory management reports enable Bears to optimize what's been earned from vendor growth programs, incentives and rebates.

Online order entry enables growth without additional data entry staff.

Scanning signed invoices along with initialed changes due to damage or refusal, eliminates paper storage, filing and retrieval, and saves time since stored mages can be emailed or Faxed to a customer or they can view them directly through entree.NET.

Bears Distributing’s logical next steps include entree.UPC for bar code scanning and entree.FMS for efficient truck routing and GPS based tracking.