Technology helps drive growth at Gateway Supply

Brothers Chris Williams (left), president, and Sam Williams Jr., chairman of the board, believe Gateway Supply's use of technology has helped them better serve their customers with improved accuracy and speed.

BY MARY JO MARTIN

Editorial director

Sam Williams Sr., Jerry Munn and Richard Moore founded Gateway Supply Company in April 1964. Each of the founders had been working with Noland Company in Columbia, S.C. Gateway’s first location was in downtown Columbia.

Initially, its primary business focus was in plumbing and heating sales to mechanical contractors in the Midlands area of the state. Each of the three founders had been in the industry for many years prior to opening Gateway and they found many generous customers who were willing to give the new company a try. Sales was their prime focus at the time. The mantra was “Nothing can happen until we sell something,” so selling a job was on top of the list of things to do. This strong sales culture continues to be the deep driving force behind Gateway Supply today.

 

During the early 1970s, Gateway entered the hvac business.  This added a new dimension and allowed the company to grow at a faster pace.

Also around that time, Gateway Supply opened its first branch location in Rock Hill, S.C. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Gateway opened a number of branches, all of which are located in South Carolina. The company now consists of 12 branches, including the corporate office. Gateway offers seven plumbing showrooms, three separate hvac-only locations and three combination plumbing and hvac locations.  Approximately 155 people are employed within the company.

While Gateway Supply started with a larger focus on commercial sales, its business now is approximately a 30% commercial and 70% residential split. Additionally, plumbing sales account for about 65% of the total volume, with hvac sales bringing in the remaining 35%.

Over the past 30+ years, sons and daughters of the founders joined the company. They included: Sam, Chris and David Williams; Kim Munn Martin and Dina Munn Latham; and Leonard Moore. The third generation of the Williams family has also begun to enter the business. Each of them has remained with Gateway Supply, despite the fact that the Williams family bought out the Munn and Moore families in 1988. “It is a testament to these families’ dedication to the company that all of the second-generation members still work at Gateway Supply Co., as does Jerry Munn, who remains very active,” noted president Chris Williams. Founders Richard Moore and Sam Williams Sr. have both passed away.

Gateway Supply has been a member of industry buying/marketing group, Embassy Group Ltd., since the 1990s. Williams called the relationships formed through Embassy “priceless,” adding that both Gateway Supply as a business and its management team personally have benefited from this participation. In addition, Gateway is a long-time member of both the American Supply Association and Southern Wholesalers Association. His brother, Sam Williams Jr., recently served as president of the latter group.

An early focus on technology

Gateway Supply began its technology drive back in the late 1970s.  “My father Sam gave me and my brothers a Franklin Ace computer and told us he really did not know what it would do,” laughed Chris Williams, “but he thought it might be a good thing to learn about.”

Around 1985, Gateway officially entered the technology age with the shims software system.

“It was during this time that we started to understand the power of technology and what it could do,” Williams explained. “During the 1990s a familiar person from shims, Johnny Hazelton, became a part of the Eclipse organization and encouraged us to take a look at what Eclipse had to offer. We did look into it the mid-1990s, but did not take the leap of faith until 1999 when we went live on Eclipse. Its advanced technology was what really sold us. From the beginning, I committed myself to learn this system and what it could do for us, which was something I had not done with shims.” 

While Eclipse provided an excellent training program for Gateway, Williams noted that there is still an incredible amount of self-training that must be done. There is simply no way for an installer to cover it all.  “Every company has little nuances that you have to work out within your own company,” he said. “If you are not willing to push buttons yourself and say ‘Oops!’ once in a while, then you won’t get the most out of it.”

According to Williams, the feature in Eclipse that he was initially the most impressed with -- and continues to be today -- is ‘queue’ functionality.  “With this feature, you do not have to remember anything at all,” he said. “The system will bring anything that you need to know - along with all supporting documents - right to your screen on whatever day that you specify.  This is the most valuable sales tool that I have ever seen. 

Since becoming a customer, Williams said it is clear that Eclipse attempts to address all of the new issues that Gateway’s customers demanded of them in this rapidly changing world.  He went on to note that the Eclipse system has not become dated over time.

Growing hand in hand

Gateway has gone through three major release upgrades since 1999 in order to take advantage of new features Eclipse has added along the way. 

“An example of how Eclipse keeps up with the changing times is the Imaging product that is offered,” Williams said. “Five years ago, this tool was not as important since there was no practical way to move images out to customers. Today, with broadband coverage in the U.S. reaching nearly 50% penetration, it is easy to move images to customers anywhere they are at the blink of an eye. Our credit department uses this feature quite a lot when the customer asks who signed for a delivery. When telling them is not enough, we can now e-mail the actual signature while we are speaking to the customer. Often before we get off the phone with them, the customer has received the image and the issue is resolved.”

Another feature that Gateway uses extensively is Report Writing. For example, it allows members of Gateway’s sales department to see exactly what products a customer is buying and how often. The ability to anticipate makes Gateway’s sales team extremely valuable to their customers.

William is also high on Eclipse’s purchasing programs: “They are written in a way that I really know of no better means to impart human knowledge to a machine than they have accomplished. There are always certain nuances that cause purchasing not to be straightforward. I cannot find one that I can’t impart to the computer for this function.” 

All of Gateway’s employees use Eclipse for something related to their job function. The company’s accounting, sales, and purchasing departments currently use Eclipse. In fact, Williams noted, “We currently use, at least to some degree, every feature that Eclipse offers -- that we know of. Hardly a day goes by that someone here says,  ‘I did not know it would do that!’”

Of course, Williams was realistic when talking about the use of technology. “People seem to think when you plug in a great new gadget, life immediately gets better.  If you expect that with Eclipse, or any other good software system, you should expect disappointment.  Honestly, during our first year with Eclipse, we asked the question many times, ‘What in the world have we done?’ But we also realized that the system was better than our company was. It anticipated things that we never really thought of, and forced us to do it better.

“There is a lot of pain and suffering that goes with getting better. The software will make your company a better one. You look around and find that you are doing a lot of things better than you did before, but it is all a gradual process. The light does not come on one day and you are there. You just find your company in a better place, with even better places to aspire to. Even though we have been on the system since 1999, we still have far to go to meet our goals as we set the bar even higher.”

Using distribution software such as Eclipse requires a commitment from top management on down. Without that, results can be mediocre. “I recall a wise man telling me on my first day of outside sales to be suspicious of Quick Easy Orders,” Williams noted. “The message was that anything too easy would not last. The exact same analogy could be used with distribution software systems. At times, it has been very difficult -- but it has been worth every second we spent on it.”

Serving the customer

Ultimately, the test of any distribution software system is how it helps a wholesaler better serve its customers. In Gateway’s case, that has proven true, with the speed and accuracy it allows Gateway employees when sharing information with customers. 

“We live in a world where it is expected that you go faster and faster,” Williams explained. “While most customers don’t explicitly comment on how quickly and accurately we get them the information they are looking for, I think they would notice if we did not do it that way. It is what is required in our business arena now.

“I can’t honestly say that we are cutting edge when it comes to technology, but I think we are doing well in keeping up with some of the new technologies available to us. An example of that are hand-held scanners. I had recently heard of hand-scanners being used in the field by outside salespeople. When we considered that our people sometimes sat and wrote down the specs on a job at a customer’s office, we thought hand-held scanners would be a good investment. We only now pull the wand across the page and we have an image that we can attach to a sales quote here in our office. Not only is it a time-saver, but it ensures that we meet the exact specs of the job without leaving anything off.”

And Gateway has no plans to slow down its embrace of technology. They have recently developed the means to build and transmit Multi Megabyte Submittal packages. “While not many architects or engineers are requesting them yet, it is a mere matter of time before the days of creating an 18-inch-tall stack of 12 submittals are behind us,” Williams said. “There is now a better way. That better way just has not become popular yet, but it will, and I would like our company to be ready when it is.”

For details, visit www.gatewaysupply.net or www.eclipse.intuit.com.