DMSi’s Agility:
A Customized Solution for the Lumber Industry

When DMSi started over 30 years ago, it was a typical software company — a “jack of all trades.” As with any maturing industry, specialization became necessary to deliver product and service excellence. With an already strong concentration of customers in the industry, DMSi chose to focus exclusively on forest and building products over 20 years ago. According to Cal German, DMSi President, “The choice to focus on lumber and building products was an easy one. It was the industry we had the most, and most satisfied, customers and the down-to-earth personality of the industry fit our company to a T.”

It was clear that the lumber and building material industry had unique needs.  The software needed to manage greatly varied inventory that could be purchased, inventoried, handled, priced and sold in a myriad of ways. Generic “off the shelf” software just wouldn’t cut it. Through research, DMSi found that only software engineered and created from inception for lumber could correctly meet the industry’s functionality requirements. Thus, DMSi made a multi-million dollar investment to develop the ideal modern day lumber solution, Agility, from scratch.  Unlike any other software on the market, Agility is a truly new Windows solution that uses the latest development methods, tools, and technologies. The core software of Agility, therefore, really fits the lumber/ remanufacturing business with little or no modification and accounts for proven industry business processes. “No other software on the market offers the depth, customer service, integration, and focus of Agility,” explains Monte Jensen, DMSi Sales Manager. “Distributors, wholesalers, and remanufacturers can really hit the ground running because their considerations are all built into Agility’s functionality.”

DMSi’s decision to focus on building product distributors – in particular lumber – would turn out to be the cornerstone of their success over the years. With their steadfast focus, DMSi eventually brought together the largest collection of people dedicated to building software for this industry. “DMSi has seen nothing but rapid growth and high customer satisfaction as a result of our relentless focus on the specific needs of the forest and building products industry.  This is a great industry to serve and our focus will not change in my lifetime”, states German.  From end to end, all phases of DMSi’s business processes capture the nuances of the industry which enables them to be a strong partner in creating the most effective solution. By addressing issues relevant to the needs of lumber companies, the industry-specific functionality of order fulfillment, tag-tally structure, and mobile solutions were designed to enhance Agility’s features.  

AutoFlow is DMSi’s answer to the need for an error-free, automated order fulfillment and back-order management system. Customers and sales representatives feel complete confidence in availability and delivery commitments because they know AutoFlow will fairly, accurately, and automatically allocate available material to their orders and choose best delivery route. This system avoids the common sales order fulfillment problems of “stealing” available inventory for another order, over-committing available material, and negative inventory situations.

The architectural and functional implications of a fully tagged and tallied inventory are pervasive throughout the Agility system. Retro-fitting software to correctly meet this inventory requirement results in a problematic patchwork of workarounds with no logical flow through every software module. At the heart of Agility is a lumber architecture that allows for a single item to have multiple branches, multiple yard locations, multiple lots, multiple units/tags, and multiple lengths imbedded in its core design. Every window, every logic component, and every application in the system was built from the ground-up to employ this fundamental lumber inventory architecture.

Manual errors typically occur 1 in every 300 entries, while a barcode environment reduces them to 1 in every 3,000,000. The Agility Mobile Solutions modules bring you barcode scanning for improved warehouse efficiency, time savings, and order accuracy resulting in better customer service.  Warehouse personnel simply scan or key the correct product, location, and quantity at the time they are physically picking for remanufactured and custom orders. Operating in real time through wireless connectivity to Agility allows office staff to update sales orders and generate pick files for the warehouse to work from. When picking is done, delivery tickets can be immediately printed without waiting for the office staff to update orders. 

For nearly 30 years, DMSi has been the leading business management solution for building product distributors and lumber wholesalers. More than 350 of North America’s top suppliers user DMSi software to efficiently manage daily activities in nearly 1,000 distribution yards, warehouses and offices. For more information about DMSi software, call 402-330-6620 or visit www.dmsi.com.

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