Pacific Coast Supply, Headquartered in North Highlands, CA is a building material distributor that services professional contractors and subcontractors. With operations in 16 states with 50 stores across the Western USA, Pacific Coast Supply is one of the largest building supply distributors on the West Coast. PCS sells over 6000 products at most stores and has been in operation for 50 years.

PCS struggled for years with their counter operations. They did not operate a separate point-of-sale solution; they instead relied upon making modifications to the SAP GUI in an attempt to build an acceptable solution. As a result, many process inefficiencies affected their daily operations. Continuing, we highlight specific examples where PSC faced operational challenges. Order entry difficulties were a continual challenge. The overall complexities and inefficiencies made the order entry process frustrating for both the sales associate and the customer. The existing order entry tool was hard to navigate and not intuitive. This often led to high rates of order entry errors and a lack of overall system control. Sales associates were challenged by existing search capabilities and often had difficulty searching for the appropriate material, even when they knew that the product existed. Finally, the users had to resort to using order entry as a scratch pad for product availability and pricing lookups. The Payment Processing system being disconnected from the Order Entry system further compounded the back-end of the order entry process and impacted customer service levels.

End-of-day reconciliation was a difficult process – both manual and time-consuming. The payment processing was also inflexible and impacted the ability to adequately support complex split tender and returns functionality. On boarding of new employees was also hindered. On average, a new employee would take months  to become proficient at using the SAP GUI and understanding the various processes required to be self-sufficient. Ultimately these reasons, and others like them, cause SAP to be a growth limiter for PCS, impacting both in store sales and presenting challenges to store expansion.

All their retail locations were using the SAP GUI as the POS as well as disconnected credit card processing and reconciliation. There were two major challenges with this set up that persisted for years and handicapped growth. First, counter sales people as well as those that interacted with the customer faced a very difficult time navigating the SAP GUI. Sales associates were spending more time with the system and less time with the customer. There was also the issue of onboarding new sales associates as they had to learn SAP, so for a sales associate this proved to be a costly endeavor. The second challenge was expansion. SAP was a barrier to bringing up new stores so time to money was severely hampered.

All stores focus on the building products industry providing exceptional service to their customers, a shared attribute and common goal with DataXstream. In 2018, Pacific Coast Supply went live with DataXstream OMS+ within their distribution business. When it set out to improve its order processes, Pacific Coast Supply turned to SAP partner DataXstream LLC to help it deploy a modern solution across multiple sites. The right offering would integrate with SAP^® software while reducing total cost of ownership, enabling fast material searches, cutting error rates, and facilitating large orders across different plants. Pacific Coast Supply has been an SAP customer for almost 20 years having initially implemented R/3 in 2001.

The decision was made to bolster all businesses by improving their use of SAP DataXstream’s OMS+ was the key enabler to making this option plausible for PCS. Through an extensive demo cycle and pilot process, OMS+, powered by PCS’s existing SAP footprint, provided the necessary proof that PCS did not need to abandon its existing SAP investment. This proved to be the right decision for PCS from a timing, capability, and overall total cost of ownership perspective. Abandoning SAP would have triggered multiple millions in implementation costs for PCS. Furthermore, it would have put PCS on a significantly longer timeline to benefit realization.

While still early in their digital transformation journey, and as a result of their OMS+ Go-Live success, PCS has experienced new-found enthusiasm regarding the use of SAP.

Specifically, OMS+ powered by SAP has delivered the following capabilities and benefits to PCS:

• Leverage its existing master data investment, conforming the OMS+ solution to their existing data footprint.
• Integrate its Order Entry and Payment Processing systems. Now with integrated payment processing, PCS can perform end-of-day reconciliations with ease.
• Reduce time spent on reconciliations execution and are creation with a significantly higher degree of accuracy.
• OMS+ payment processing allowed for flexible tendering processes, providing functionality for multi-tender, easy refunds, and on-account processing.

OMS+ has significantly reduced the time required to train a Sales Associate. This benefit is most apparent in the onboarding of new associates. Historically, PCS would invest months  in training a new associate to be productive. The same level of proficiency is now achieved in 1-2 days training. To summarize, PCS will now be able to greatly reduce onboarding time of new sales associates, increase efficiencies with existing stores and provide shorter time to money with new stores. has newfound confidence in its SAP Solution and is excited about future modernization and expansion opportunities.

OMS+ out of the box is an extremely capable product. However, equaling that capability, is OMS+’s inherent ability to rapidly personalize to an industry or customer-specific set of requirements. This ability allowed us to meet PCS specific demands in relatively short order.

With OMS+, DataXstream was able to deliver in 6 months, what had not been achievable in 20 years. DataXstream’s brings deep significant industry experience to wholesalers and the markets they serve. We’ve been invited to speak at numerous industry and SAP events and most recently presented on how wholesalers can successfully combat the Amazon effect. DataXstream’s OMS+ combines the benefits of its modern user interface with the power of SAP® Sales and Distribution modules to give organizations a significant competitive advantage by enabling complex SAP® order processing with minimal end-user training.  It allows for real-time interaction with the supply chain and significantly reduces system support costs.  Built and deployed on SAP®’s Cloud Platform, OMS+ when paired with SAP®’s S/4 HANA, Business Suite for HANA, or ECC, provides further real-time insight into call centers and products. No other order management / POS product on the market achieves this level of visibility to scale. OMS+ increases sales and improves customer satisfaction, winning on the front line with tools that deliver.

DataXstream brought three specific domains of expertise to Pacific Coast Supply:

1. We know counter sales.
2. We know Wholesale Distribution.
3. We know SAP.

Through streamlined design and ongoing configuration controls, which allow you to adjust to changing needs, OMS+ allowed Pacific Coast Supply to start their modernization journey and increase total experience.