Premier Service Co. cuts costs with Kojo's inventory management solution

Having a warehouse but lacking visibility into what was in stock was creating more pain for Premier than they wanted.

10 years ago, Premier Service Co. were struggling to keep their field focused on building. The field was instead spending time worrying about which materials had been ordered and dealing with deliveries to the job site. To solve the issue, they decided to add a warehouses to their business operations. “We moved to warehouse space and made sure that our employees in the field were not burdened with needing to know about what was coming in, unloading materials, and all that kind of stuff,'' says President Gary Phillips.

As they got their warehouse workflow up and running, a new challenge emerged. They needed a way for all their teams to stay informed on what materials were available in the warehouse. They made their warehouse operation work within their back office, but their field was still in the dark. Without knowing what was ordered and when it would be shipped to the job site, the foremen couldn’t properly plan their days and resorted to creating orders for materials that were already sitting in the warehouse.

Over the next decade, Premier tried different methods to fix their problems with no success. From using cumbersome pen and paper to spreadsheets that required tedious data entry, to building expensive custom software, nothing was working. Gary explains, “Spreadsheets don’t tie in the [Purchase Order] side so you have to write a PO, and then you have to write it again for purchasing and then go back and manually update when you receive materials. It just didn’t work.” Gary’s true goal was to find a solution that ensured his team would know which materials are in the warehouse at any given time.

Kojo provides the warehouse visibility Premier needs. In Gary’s words, “Right now, we're seeing that [Kojo] is a very solid investment now and for the future of the company.”

The Kojo team worked with Gary and his company to understand their inventory management needs and proceeded to set everything up with him from start to finish. Premier's field team easily adopted and implemented Kojo into their day-to-day operation. Instead of ordering duplicate materials at the jobsite, the field can see and request what's in the warehouse from their Kojo mobile app, ultimately reducing the amount of materials leftover at the at end of the job. “To be able to place the order, track the order, see when it’s going to be delivered, and the accountability that comes along with it is so easy with Kojo. There isn’t anybody that’s not enjoying that part of it.”

By gaining real-time visibility of what's coming in and out of the warehouse, Premier's purchasing team is making smarter purchasing decisions. They're taking advantage of using more of the materials readily available in the warehouse, rather than purchasing more, which has cut down on job delays. They've also increased bulk ordering now that they have control over managing the warehouse inventory. This has had a significant impact on cutting down their material costs. Gary explains, “I’d estimate as close to 60-70% of our material buys are now done in large quantities and over multiple jobs at a time because we can now see what we bought for each individual job.

“Before, when we were having issues getting materials and tracking them, there were jobs that we were looking at that we didn't take because we were unsure whether or not we were gonna be able to fill the order,” Gary explains. “But when we were able to start seeing what we had in inventory, we knew we could start those jobs in a timely manner, and that was a game changer for us.” 

Premier has now solved their 10-year challenge of bringing visibility into warehouse inventory for their field, office, and warehouse teams.