Premiere Building Supply has been a fixture in Lancaster County, PA for more than 20 years. In the beginning they operated both a construction arm and a distribution arm, but in the last five years they’ve moved exclusively to distribution. They supply ProVia windows, doors, and stone veneer as well as other quality window and door products to customers across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic.
“We have a sales team, we have a customer service team, we have guys out in the warehouse that are staging the products, and then we have usually two or three trucks on the road every day,” said Ruth Sheaffer, Premiere’s customer service manager. “We also have an in-house service technician that goes out and services our products.”
Premiere is all about creating a positive customer experience, choosing the best products with the strongest warranties and creating a showroom where contractors can send their homeowner customers to see products in person. When you step into their showroom, you’re immediately impressed by the clean look, friendly atmosphere, and the quality of the displays showcasing some of the windows and doors distributed by the company.
“Our showroom is where contractors can send their homeowner customers to make final purchasing decisions,” Ruth said. “It’s really an extra service that we offer to the contractor and a way we can go above and beyond for them.”
Premiere has used Koble’s EBMS (an ERP system) to manage their business since 2002. Business technology has changed a lot since then, but EBMS has grown right along with Premiere, helping them transition to distribution-only, adding innovative new products to inventory, and starting a second location near Boston, Mass.
“EBMS is the backbone of our business, and we use it to quote orders, place orders, track our inventory, and to pull up the reports that we need to manage our customers and their accounts better,” said Ruth. “We’ve also been able to integrate it with some of our other systems in a way that saves us quite a lot of data entry.”
EBMS integrates with ProVia’s EntryLink system so that ProVia’s product data is pulled directly into EBMS. That means that the Premiere team has ProVia part numbers and all of the product options right at their fingertips. In addition to that impressive integration, Premiere continues to shape EBMS into the custom tool they need it to be.
“Whenever we're in a meeting and we're discussing how we could make a system or procedure better, we know that we can go ask Koble what they can do for us,” Ruth said.
“We have a diverse customer base, so something that we asked for was the option to look at a sales order and know whether this customer wants to receive sales orders by mail or email. And in response to that, Koble was able to put a small custom box exactly where we asked that told us whether this invoice needed to be printed or emailed.”
With EBMS as a partner, Premiere is planning for future growth, looking toward a larger showroom and warehouse space and continuing to add new product lines. EBMS is a tool that shapes their successful processes and helps make Premiere both an excellent supplier to its customers and an excellent place to work.
“Over the last few years, we've worked hard to build a culture of good camaraderie, a team that wants to serve customers well, that wants to be efficient, and that wants to show up and do their best every single day,” Ruth said. “We pride ourselves on being innovative and on starting new things.”
Melanie Hess is a content writer at Koble. She loves diving into relevant business topics and sharing what she learns through writing articles, blog posts, and more. When she's not learning about ERP implementation, business financials, or inventory management, she likes long walks, podcasts, and trivia competitions.
