Client Profile:

Founded in 1966, Evans’ Furniture has served the Yuba-Sutter area since inception, and to this day continues to be a locally owned Evans family business. Today, they have a combined 93,000 square feet of showrooms, in three stores, making them the largest Home Furnishings retailer north of Sacramento to the Oregon border. They also have 3 warehouses that are a combined 90,000 square feet.

Background:

Evans Furniture was identified as a Major Account that we needed to target and get a meeting with. With the assistance of Ken Mills, we were able to identify the 2 key individuals. After multiple attempts and with Ken’s persistence we began conversations in Oct 2013 with Tim Herron, Director of IT. Tim’s responsibility was to provide initial background, needs and potential scope of project. We also identified Harry Swinney, VP and CEO of Evans as the person who would make all final decisions. Harry is also the grandson of the Founder of Evans Furniture.

Assessment:

During the initial meeting, Tim outlined the basic requirements as well as some of the other unique needs they have. There was 4 locations that were needing to be assessed. 3 of the 4 had very similar requirements with the 4th having a slightly different set of needs. The 3 locations that had similar needs were the showroom/store locations in Yuba City, Chico, and Redding. The 4th location was at the warehouse/admin office at their Corp HQ in Yuba City. In addition to the standard print jobs in the showrooms, they were needing the ability to print odd size price tags (5×8 card stock) to place on their furniture, and because their current equipment could not handle that, they were outsourcing those print jobs. If they were to bring that print job in house, we determined they would save approx. $100-$200 a month per location. Additionally, they are utilizing a standard accounting application where they would print invoices and customer receipts where they were using duplicate carbon NCR paper, and wanted a universal set of equipment that would handle those print jobs exactly the same from one location to the next. At the time, because of their mismatch of equipment, there were experiencing multiple errors and frustrations at each location.

In meeting with Harry, his needs came down to a few main things: equipment that was cost effective, ease of use, as well as to lower the frustrations of his employees. With the current equipment they had, none of these needs were being met.

RMC Solution:

Before I provided any proposal or recommended any particular type of equipment, I went out and purchased the exact type of card stock and accounting NCR paper to test in the machines we had in our Marysville location. With the help of the Senior Service Technician, Vincent Rodriguez, we tested both the Canon and Samsung equipment to see how these print jobs would perform. The special print jobs certainly didn’t perform correctly the first time so Vincent and I tried different settings, different trays, etc. until we understood better how these machines could accommodate their special needs. Once we determined that there were multiple machines that could do what they were needing, I then started penciling out the different cost structures.

After presenting them with two options, they decided on the Samsung CLX9201. We replaced 2 Konica Minoltas and 2 Gestetner’s with 4 Samsung 9201. We were able to standardize at each location, provide similar end users experiences as well as provide simplified billing with cost breakdown per location.

Implementation:

We wanted to do a phased implementation approach so we could make sure each location was up and running as needed. Because of the nature of Evans Furniture’s customer focus and experience, delivery and set up was a component we wanted to start off strong with. Our logistics team, Cody Hansen and Rich Pesqueira were on top of it with the scheduling and the actual delivery of their equipment. Rich was at each location 10-15 minutes before the scheduled time to survey the location and connect with the correct people. With the assistance of Vincent Rodriguez, we were able to get the initial location at the Yuba City HQ up and running with minimal problems. Once that was completed, we moved to the showroom location in Yuba City, followed by Chico and then Redding. Due to the unique nature of this implementation it did have its fair share of challenges that we needed to correct and overcome, however, with the knowledge and patience of our service tech teams we were able to get all locations up and running.

Summary:

The key individuals in this were Ken Mills, Vincent Rodriguez, Chris Jones, Gary Geiger, Richard Pesqueira, Cody Hansen.

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