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Cole Chuman Email
Director Marketing/Datacommunications . Crum Electric Supply Co.
Casper, WY
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Through all the changes, Crum Electric Supply has focused on technology and the efficiencies it brings, though it\'s not always easy to get advanced systems set up out here. When Crum Electric Supply opened its newest branch last November in Cody, a town of about 8,000 people at the east gate of Yellowstone Park, Crum wanted to start the branch out on the new frame-relay network to avoid the cost of installing modems and leased data lines. The phone company was installing a new fiber-optic system in the area and was eager to comply, but the weather intervened. One of the relay stations supporting the network was on top of a mountain, and due to heavy snows, they weren\'t able to get up there until the spring thaw. Cody only recently joined the cloud. The company\'s fascination with technology took another form last October with the creation of a new datacom division, Crum.com, that supplies products for data and communications networks. The new business takes Crum another step along the diversification path while providing a convenience for his contractor customers, many of whom are getting job bids with the electrical and datacom systems quoted together. Datacom demand is soaring as the technology spreads into every kind of operation. \"The schools are buying it like gang-busters; the universities and colleges are buying it. What we\'re finding, when you quote a hospital and you quote a cement plant now, dad-gum, they\'re starting to look just alike,\" Crum says with a laugh. \"The controls are all electronic; they\'re all local-area-network-based, computer-based. Fiber-optic loops are all through the hospital; they\'re all through the cement plant. There seems to be a convergence here of some kind.\" If his expectations prove true, the datacom division should keep him laughing for a long time to come. One person who\'s already smiling is Sear Thapa, Crum Electric Supply\'s information specialist. He\'s the one who gets to rebuild the company\'s entire network nerve-center with the very latest technology, so the datacom guys can show it off to customers. Thapa and Miquelle Bernard, information technology specialist, get the task of executing the electronic commerce experiments that Crum concocts. They are responsible for all the MIS needs of a 70-person, nine-branch operation, and both say they enjoy the challenge of bringing information technology to bear on the day-to-day problems of operating an electrical distributorship. Not that Crum Electric Supply has all the most technologically advanced systems on the planet. Crum is obviously eager to try new things, but the company doesn\'t pursue technology for technology\'s sake. One example is bar coding. Crum believes it may not be economically sensible for small distributors to invest in bar coding, especially as long as so many manufacturers in the industry can\'t seem to put a decent bar code on their boxes. \"It\'s the economies of scale,\" he says. \"There\'s a huge number of small companies like Crum where you have branches that only need one or two warehousemen, regardless of the volume. To give them bar-code capabilities to do that job, you need to really evaluate what kind of productivity it\'s going to bring you.\" Nonetheless, Crum says he would jump into bar coding in an instant if more manufacturers were properly labeling their boxes. \"It would improve accuracy and instill a culture of using the systems, which helps with growth,\" he says. \"If we can get the systems installed and grow with those in place, we\'re ready when we get to the size where we need it.\" Crum\'s vision is not filled with futuristic gizmos, but with proven technology used to solve real-world problems. The company\'s systems consist of client-server networks in each branch,personal computers on local-area networks (LANs),that are connected to the company\'s Central Services offices in Casper via the frame-relay T1 cloud. On that cloud Crum has a public Web site accessible from the Internet and a company intranet that sits behind a firewall and is only available to Crum employees. A drawback of client-server networks is that most of the programming resides on the individual PCs, so most problems have to be solved there. Over the frame-relay system, Thapa and Bernard are able to take over any employee\'s PC in any Crum Electric Supply location and solve problems remotely, using a piece of software called \"Timbuktu.\" The program also works over modems and conventional data lines, but the speed over the T1 makes it far more efficient. The costs saved in eliminated travel time and hotel nights,sometimes for a problem that took five minutes to fix,are just part of the savings Crum believes are available to any distributor who embraces new technologies. Crum\'s contention is that the productivity gained more than compensates for the cost of the technologies, if distributors are willing to invest the effort to understand and fully use what they have. Benefits of the T1 cloud, for example, are numerous. The immediate cost savings in telephone bills have been perhaps the strongest tangible encouragement for Crum in the early phases of the project. The frame-relay network has the capacity to combine voice and data transmissions, so rather than paying long-distance bills on a per-call basis, voice traffic is included in the flat monthly rate for the T1. \"We feel that the payout for changing from modems to frame-relay will come in about 18 months,\" Crum says. \"We\'re very excited about the savings we\'re going to see there.\" Then there\'s the speed of Internet access. Over a T1 connection, the Internet begins to approach the speeds of a LAN, making searches for information much more productive. \"We\'re getting virtually every single Crum Electric employee involved with the Internet and getting them familiar with it so they can take it from there and continue to learn about it,\" Crum says. \"That\'s one of the big things we\'re doing culturally within our company.\" All the industry involvement with NAED and IDEA, as well as state development councils he sits on, means Crum is out of the office much of the time. Is it wise in these circumstances to give everybody in the place high-speed Internet access? Won\'t they just waste time surfing? \"No,\" says Jeff Hockin, vice president and general manager. He\'s the one who makes sure the trucks and forklifts run on time. \"You find that they do very little of that, and the productivity, the speed with which they can get information, far outweighs that stuff.\" Of all the communications technology available, lowly e-mail is the most valuable so far, and getting employees comfortable with e-mail is an important step, Crum says. \"I\'m really trying to promote the use of e-mail in communicating with our manufacturers, our reps and our customers, and it\'s beginning to happen,\" he says. \"Our quotations coming from manufacturers\' reps are beginning to come as an attached Excel file, which means we don\'t have to manually retype the quote.\" It also saves on rewrites when more than one customer is bidding on the same job. E-mail has also increased the productivity of Crum\'s publishing operations several-fold. Every month, Crum produces an internal newsletter filled with news and announcements about the company. He says he does it because everybody else is too busy. The newsletter includes pieces written by each branch manager, and Crum used to spend about eight hours a month typing in the articles and laying out the newsletter. Now that branch managers submit their articles via e-mail, Crum is able to do the whole thing in a couple of hours. \"Right there I save six or seven hours a month,\" he says. Beyond the immediate cost savings and productivity improvements, the T1 cloud and all the other technology prepares Crum Electric Supply for the future. In Crum\'s vision of the future, one day most distributors will have T1 clouds, and those clouds could connect through an industry cloud,an industry-wide extranet,with each other, with manufacturers and reps, associations and buying groups, maybe even with customers. Such an extranet may be in the IDEA\'s future, he suggested, but declined to elaborate further, saying that the work of getting the data warehouse up and operating is the first, and, at this point, only project on IDEA\'s plate. The investment in technology also prepares Crum Electric Supply to use the tools it will need to support future growth. \"We don\'t invest in technology to reduce the number of people. We invest in technology so that we can grow without having to add as many people,\" he says. The challenge of adding people of the highest caliber is another area where Crum believes his investments in technology show definite benefits. \"People want an environment they find challenging and where they can be effective,\" Crum says. \"If you want to attract and retain the best and the brightest, you have to support them. Otherwise, they won\'t have the tools to do the job the way they know it should be done.\" Crum Electric Supply is using its intranet to help people do their jobs more effectively and work with the equipment more confidently. The first step is to get people used to using it. Thapa and Bernard did this by having employees make reservations for the company Christmas party via an online form. Once people get comfortable, they can begin using it for more advanced information-gathering tasks, such as getting answers to computer-related questions. Thapa puts service-call notes into a searchable database on the intranet. Employees can search by hardware or software problems and find a list of fixes that can help them solve some of the more common problems on their own and call Thapa and Bernard only when something new or more severe comes up. From the standpoint of management efficiency, the ease of exchanging reports, either through e-mail or by posting them on the intranet, will allow Crum Electric Supply to eliminate the 2-in. stack of monthly paper reports branch managers all get,a major benefit, says Hockin. More than that, though, the reports generated by a good business system add clarity to decision-making, Crum says. \"Now you\'re not managing as much by gut feeCrum Electric Supply Co. Address
1165 English Ave.Casper, WY
United States