Cowin Customer Success Story
Cowin Empowered Employees with Industry-Best Analytics
Cowin Equipment Company is an equipment dealer specializing in heavy construction equipment for general contractors, mining/quarrying, industrial, forestry, and other industries. Cowin is a full service distributor primarily covering Alabama, Georgia, Northwest Florida, and coastal Mississippi. Cowin has facilities in Birmingham, Huntsville-Decatur, Montgomery, Mobile, and Oxford, Alabama, Atlanta, Georgia, and Pensacola, Florida.
Cowin Equipment Company also has a very large and diverse rental fleet, and is recognized by RER magazine as one of the top 60 rental companies in North America. At all locations, Cowin continues to promote its “hybrid” strategy of equal emphasis on sales and rental, combined with a total commitment to product support. We feel that this “hybrid” strategy is the ultimate in customer responsiveness! Whether a customer wants to rent, buy, or rent with an option to purchase, Cowin is utterly flexible and receptive to those needs.
Cowin Equipment Company
Headquartered: Birmingham, Alabama, US
Founded: 1924
Locations: 8 locations in 3 US states
Industries: Construction, Aggregate, Mining/Quarrying, Forestry and more
OEMs: Volvo, Case, Grove, Kobelco, Takeuchi, Doosan, Hitachi, BOMAG and more
Challenges
In choosing a new system Cowin Equipment was looking for a future-proof dealer management system with excellent analytic capabilities.
“We had our previous system for more than 30 years. It was a good system, but we had outgrown it,” said CIO DeWayne Searcy. “We needed something with more data analytics capabilities and more process control, and e-Emphasys has definitely stepped up our game in that regard.”
Searcy: “e-Emphasys has two things that we were primarily concerned with. One being the process control environment. One thing that was very important to us was making sure our processes remained under control, and e-Emphasys really had a grasp on that with their Business Process Modeling technique and the way they implement their system. The other was analytic approach. It was crucial for us to find a system where we could extract the analytics we need to make better decisions day in and day out. Hands down e-Emphasys met both those criteria.”
“e-Emphasys certainly had the latest technology,” said President Jamie Cowin. “One of the competitors appeared to be old green screen technology laid over newer Microsoft software, but it wasn’t really the latest and greatest.”
Cowin: “It was very important to me to improve the analytics and understanding of everything we were doing rental wise. Among our choices for software, e-Emphasys stood out as best analytics. e-Emphasys was the consensus choice among our team.”
Solutions and Benefits
“Our decision to go with e-Emphasys ERP came after about a year of studying all the different systems available across the country,” said Stephen Searcy, VP of Product Support. “We put them up side-by-side each other and e-Emphasys ERP just out shined the rest of them as far as what we were looking for. To go from a flat file system to the new software that’s available, they just out shined the rest of them of the competitors.”
Searcy: “It’s exceeded our expectations. The data that’s available to us through the Business Intellect has given us data that allows us to be proactive instead of reactive.”
Cowin now has all the data they need to make decisions at their fingertips on a daily basis.
“We were sending out multiple reports a month. Now with the BI (Business Intelligence), you login and it’s there,” said Brantley Clay, Business Development Manager. “It updates the previous day at 5 o’clock, so any information that you’re looking for that we were sometimes waiting until the end of the month to do is now there on a daily basis. You can take those reports and build them any way you want to. It’s a tremendous tool that’s on my computer every single day. One of the first things I do in the morning is log in to the BI.”
Cowin Equipment is confident in the future success of their business in large part because of the future-proof technology available to them with e-Emphasys ERP.
DeWayne Searcy: “What I like about the e-Emphasys company itself, is that they’re investing heavily in research and development for future enhancements.”
“Without a doubt I would recommend the e-Emphasys ERP system to anyone that’s looking,” said Stephen Searcy. “They know the product, they know the dealerships, and they know the processes that are the best to use in the business. They’re experts at what they do. You buy in to what they’re telling you because you trust it.”
Without a doubt I would recommend the e-Emphasys ERP system to anyone that’s looking, they know the product, they know the dealerships, and they know the processes that are the best to use in the business. They’re experts at what they do. You buy in to what they’re telling you because you trust it.
- Stephen Searcy, VP of Product Sales, Cowin Equipment Company
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