C.C. DICKSON COMPANY IMPLEMENTS CUTWATER SOFTWARE FOR DATA ANALYSIS AND PERFORMANCE REPORTING

Cutwater’s Preconfigured Solution for Activant Prophet 21 (P21) will support more than 100 branches in the Southeastern United States

With more than 100 branches and 2,300 product lines, C.C. Dickson Company is one of the largest HVAC wholesale distributors in the Southeastern United States. To support a large distributed management and sales staff, C.C. Dickson has implemented Cutwater BI (Business Intelligence) software, preconfigured for the distributor’s transaction system, Activant Prophet 21 (P21). Cutwater BI allows C.C. Dickson Company to access and report on invoice history, orders, purchase history and inventories. 

“We have a large, distributed organization focused on ensuring our customers can rely on us to have the product they need, when they need it,” said Pete Bleynat, IT director at C.C. Dickson. “Reports are one thing. When sales reps and branch managers can quickly answer a question – using data they can get to themselves – that’s an entirely different capability.” 

Wholesale distributors like C.C. Dickson face increasing pressure to grow their businesses and stay competitive while controlling costs. Key to accomplishing this is to provide more people across the company self-service access to the data and reports they need. 

Cutwater’s preconfigured software allows P21 distributors to report on invoice history, orders, purchase history and inventories within minutes of Cutwater software installation.  Report categories are mapped to P21 tables and fields, removing implementation effort and resulting in a product which does not need much maintenance over time. Cutwater software is multi-user, strong enough for data-intensive environments and is entirely Microsoft-based.

“Because C.C. Dickson has such a large number of locations and distributed management, it was very important that they have a software solution that wouldn’t require any training,” said Jim Heatherington, managing director of Cutwater. “Cutwater features are restricted to those that allow a person to select, sort, and summarize data – without having to call someone for a report request. This lessens the workload on the IT staff and results in people using data more frequently.” 

Cutwater software allows users to query data and save reports from their desktop, without having to learn a cumbersome report writer or complex software interface.  Users select desired data from preconfigured report areas and view results in a spreadsheet format. Cutwater software is entirely Microsoft-based and integrated with Microsoft Excel. 

About C.C. Dickson Company

C.C. Dickson Company, headquartered in Rock Hill, SC, is one of the largest wholesale distributors of heating, air conditioning, ventilation, and refrigeration equipment in the Southeastern United States. C.C. Dickson serves the market with over 100 branch locations and one of the largest central warehouses in the industry, stocking products from industry leaders such as Honeywell, Emerson Technologies and AirEase. More on C.C. Dickson can be found at www.ccdickson.com.