Get  Up and Running…Quickly

ABOUT SAGE SUSTAINABLE ELECTRONICS:

Sage Sustainable Electronics® is a privately held Ohio LLC, based in Columbus with four locations nationally. With leadership that embodies many decades of work in IT Operations, Asset Management, Compliance, and Security, Sage is fields an experienced team in IT asset disposition (ITAD) also offering Asset Management (ITAM), Donation, Redeployment, Recycling, and Data Destruction services.

THE CHALLENGE:

Sage Sustainable Electronics is an ITAD formulated in May of 2014. Having come from the leadership at Redemtech (which led the industry in defining responsible best practices for IT asset reuse and recycling before being bought in 2012), Sage ownership was ready to implement its new vision for sustainable IT…quickly.  The management team was soon assembled and the main facility was being setup.  Having invested in almost 15 years in the development of a proprietary warehouse management system at Redemtech, the Sage team was well aware of the large task ahead to find or build a system that could support their visions in servicing the enterprise customers they had lined up.

Being a fully data driven IT asset disposition company, Sage was looking to promise more secure, more rewarding, and more sustainable results. Their secret would be in their proprietary Sage BlueBook®, the world’s largest repository of used electronics values. Sage also wanted a keen focus on customer service and were developing their own Sage Central, a cutting edge front end customer portal to keep customers as informed as possible. This back-end warehouse management solution needed to integrate with both.

THE SOLUTION:

After evaluating various platforms, the decision was made to adopt Makor ERP™ as the warehouse management system to facilitate the startup.  Makor Solutions met with the Sage team to perform a thorough GAP analysis and determine if any Sage requirements were not covered in the base Makor ERP™ platform.  It was evident quickly that the customer contract built into the platforms CRM, the guided production life cycle management processing of inbound material and financial settlement tools would cover a majority of Sage needs.

“Makor ERP™ provides us with a foundation platform, integrating key functions for security and value recovery that our enterprise customers require. It’s the only solution we found that understands ITAD ‘out of the box,’” stated Robert Houghton, CEO, Sage Sustainable Electronics.

The Makor Solutions Top Tier Implementation team then went to work analyzing the key business units to determine best configuration options and to gather enhancement requirements and proceeded to walk all managers through thorough training so they could champion the cutover tasks.

The solution put in place included a regimented customer loading process to ensure all of the advanced services being offered were enforced and tracked for settlement.  The production life cycle process was setup to optimize Sage’s systematic conveyor setup of material movement from Receiving, to Registration to Testing and other stops for servicing.  Detailed inventorying procedures were setup to guarantee data security, accuracy and allow for thoroughly tracked upgrades.  Sage’s ledger system was fully integrated to create a direct flow of services and fees into the proper accounts to automate settlement. Makor provided API’s to Sage internal developers to be able to connect their proprietary front-end systems to the Makor ERP™.

THE RESULT:

Within six months of inception, Sage was up and running with its main warehouse fully operational running on the Makor ERP™ system tailored to offer the advanced ITAD services Sage has become well known for offering its customers. Major enterprise accounts were able to be serviced upon launch. Very soon after, Sage was able to bring three other warehouses on-line nationally spreading their reach to every corner of the country.

Aside from being able to support full throttle operations almost immediately, the Makor ERP™, together with Sage operational management, has brought a number of efficiencies in throughput, inventory management and data security.

THROUGHPUT AND ACCURACY

“With both best practices in place and the flexibility to adjust to our specific needs, the Makor ERP™ brings efficiencies and allows us to maximize warehouse space and production line usage,” said David Wood, Baltimore Facility Manager.

The tight integration with BIOS/Data Erasure tools such as Blancco is hugely important for a data security requirements. The auto-populating of data greatly increases the rate at which data bearing assets can be processed. The security and accuracy gains are immeasurable,” said Amanda Shepherd, Reno Facility Manager.

In some cases, Sage reported 140% increases in registering IT Assets with bar codes in the Makor ERP™ versus doing outside of the system. Sage has been able to steadily increase throughput of IT assets processed many times over since beginning to use the system and scaling across 4 locations.

ACCURATE INVENTORY MANAGEMENT

The part management functionality within the Makor ERP™ has allowed Sage to more efficiently manage this intricate aspect of inventory management by accurately tracking quantities, location, upgrade value, internal part orders and credits due. The Makor ERP’s advanced parts inventory functionality and associated reporting was hugely important to standing up our business,” insisted Mike Leonard, Sage Parts Manager.

IMPROVED TIME TO CASH

Managing customer settlement and maintaining a solid time to cash conversion has resulted with the Makor ERP™ being able to automatically tally both inbound job and downstream sales activity for billing and reporting. “The Makor ERP’s ability to connect with eBay for a seamless capture of sales orders and invoice accordingly removes error from duplicate entry and allows orders to be processed faster.  This is critical for keeping our customers happy and recognizing revenue in a timely fashion,” pointed out Dana Nichols, Controller.

With their proprietary BlueBook® and advanced front-end portal, Sage can promise more secure, more rewarding, and more sustainable results. The Makor ERP™ is there in the background working in tandem to make sure the job gets done successfully.