By its own admission, the timber industry is rooted in tradition and it hasn’t always been the quickest to adopt new technologies or routes to market. However, as it embraces the potential that information technology brings, that is certainly changing.
As evidence of this, software provider Ten- 25 points to the fact it has taken on several new timber sector customers in the past year.
“We’ve had several from one group – FW Morgans, Nicks & Co (Timber) Ltd and Morgan Direct – which is great,” said Ian Oldrey, Ten-25’s managing director. “We have another four timber companies – a mix of hardwood and softwood merchants, plus an importer – who are implementing our Merchanter software at the moment and we have an existing timber agent who is upgrading from the old system to the new one,” he added. “There is plenty to keep the project team busy.”
So busy, in fact, that in December last year Ten-25 recruited Ryan Osborne as system implementation and project manager. Mr Osborne, who was previously IT manager at Silva Timber Products Ltd and, before that, Hoppings Softwood Products Ltd, has a wealth of experience and is now running Ten-25’s project team.
“It’s pretty full on,” said Mr Oldrey.
“We used to do a few systems a year and the implementations were carried out by the larger help desk team. Now we have a dedicated team just for getting customers up and onto the system.”
K8 software provider, Kerridge Commercial Systems (KCS) says “the landscape is changing” and attributes some of that to the flow of private equity money coming into the market.
“The industry estimates it’s about 43% owned by private equity now and believes that will rise to 65% within the next two years,” said James Mitchell, KCS managing director UK, Ireland and the Nordics.
“In my view that’s important because those businesses look to create value and one of the great ways of doing that is by being efficient in their processes and set-up and by having economies of scale,” continued Mr Mitchell.
“They want lots of outlets and lots of merchants because that gives them greater buying power. They are also looking for great IT systems that can centralise back-office functions, purchasing, order processing, price book cataloguing and so on for the whole group. They can only really achieve that by going digital and with help from business solution providers such as KCS.
“We are pleased to have some 70% of the top 20 merchants in the UK using our products and – absolutely – they are asking us to provide them with digital solutions across the board.
“The independents also know they need to digitise and, although they are not as advanced as private equity-driven businesses, they are getting there at a different pace.”
When it comes to e-commerce [as opposed to ERP system implementation] BisTrack provider Epicor is less convinced of the march of digitisation across the timber industry, pointing to challenges outside the sector’s control.
“We haven’t seen as many new e-commerce projects among our timber customers this year,” said Adam Lee, Epicor’s sales manager, UK distribution. “Overall, the sector has faced challenges from macro-economic conditions, such as [high] interest rates, which have slowed the pace of investment.
“Perhaps e-commerce is no longer seen as a ‘new’ endeavour and most of our customers who found it suitable have already initiated their strategies,” he continued, adding that those who have invested are continuing to improve their sites.
“There’s also increased competition from national distributors and alternative marketplace providers, or other e-commerce approaches, such as NearSt,” he added, more of which later.
Accessibility to digital solutions has come on in leaps and bounds and if the question is ‘is there an app for that?’ the answer is probably ‘yes’.
KCS held its regular Konnect event in Ireland in May (the next Konnect in the UK will be in March 2025) and brought customers up to speed with apps it brought to the UK market through last year.
“These are gaining significant traction,” said Mr Mitchell. “Companies such as Howarth Timber, for example, are using our electronic proof of delivery app – ePOD – which runs on a smart device, throughout their fleet. MKM is putting this technology into all their vehicles and Joseph Parr is also deploying it within their fleet.
“We’re enhancing that app with the ability to take payment at the point of delivery,” added Mr Mitchell. “The ability to take a credit card payment at point of delivery is powerful.”
Other KCS apps winning fans among merchant customers include ePick and eReceipt and the company has also brought out an app for stock checking in branch. This provides the ability to undertake full and perpetual stock takes, and also ad hoc counts.
“We’re also bringing out an app for eSales,” said Mr Mitchell. “We are seeing more merchants looking for the ability to take orders on the road – or even in their own depots where sales assistants with iPads can take orders for customers.
“One of our customers is currently looking to create a fast fulfilment system, where the tradesman comes into the depot, orders his goods and within eight minutes of placing the order, all the items will be loaded onto his van in the yard. The only way they can do that is by digitising the order process, making it a lot quicker in the depot.”
Another product being introduced by KCS is the integration of authorisation processes onto mobile devices. Although not strictly an app, it will enable hyperlinks to authorise events. For example, a salesperson in a branch needing permission from their manager to offer a discount can get instant authorisation.
Upgrades and updates to ERP systems have also come thick and fast.
“We’ve worked with so many timber companies in the past that there’s a lot of functionality already out there, but clients still ask for capabilities that are very specific to them,” said Ian Oldrey at Ten-25. “That helps them run their business and also enhances the product overall.
“We have a timber agent client and we’re adding in a lot of functionality for them around making sales as an agency. Some functions come out of a client’s particular requirements but other functionality we add in speculatively, such as suggested re-ordering. No one was specifically requesting it, but we’ve added it in and everyone gets the benefit.”
Functions within Merchanter that have proved useful and popular include the ability to track unique items – individual pieces of timber, or power tools, for example – purchase invoice matching and stock taking.
“Enhancements to the stock taking function break the yard down so you can count in the different locations that a product may be held,” said Mr Oldrey. “And purchase invoice matching is one of those things that is relatively straightforward for some businesses, but timber companies need to be a bit cannier. The software needs to be able to say, ‘this is close to what we originally ordered, rather than an exact match – is that actually correct?’. It needs to work smarter.”
Epicor also reports success with its software updates, including to its Warehouse Management (WMS) option, which supports order picking.
“It has been a strong growth area and remains a popular choice for suitable customers,” said Adam Lee. “We’ve enhanced it multiple times this year, now supporting timber packs and variable width (hardwood) picking processes. We’ve also harmonised the architecture within our Azure MSSQL offering. BisTrack WMS complements the BisTrack core software, removes complexity and improves ease of use and access to data. We also provide a suite of simpler inventory solutions delivered as mobile apps to suit various customer needs and budgets.”
BisTrack has frequent new releases throughout the year, driven by product management processes that rely heavily on customer input, especially through its Customer Advisory Council and the Epicor Ideas portal.
“We’ve recently welcomed two UK customers to the council – Bradfords Building Supplies and James Latham Ltd,” said Mr Lee. “Both attended our global customer event, Insights, in Nashville, joining 900 other like-minded folks. BisTrack has a comprehensive three-year roadmap that includes hundreds of smaller software improvements as well as bigger ticket AI-led initiatives and integrations with our portfolio products – such as smart forecasting software for inventory optimisation – and thirdparty specialist products, such as Transport Management options from Trimble.”
The company’s Automation Studio, which gives customers the ability to connect with other software programs with little or no IT coding needed, has had widespread impact, added Mr Lee.
“The ability to integrate and automate processes that are outside of the boundaries of the core BisTrack coverage remains a key topic for Epicor and transitioning BisTrack to a full web-based product and enabling a comprehensive suite of APIs (application programming interfaces) is an ongoing journey,” he said. “We expect the Automation Studio for BisTrack to be available later this year or early next.
“We’ve pivoted some of our development capacity to create better tools to help our UK customers accessing and upgrading to the latest SaaS (software as a service) versions,” added Mr Lee. “This move to SaaS ensures that BisTrack becomes evergreen software for those customers, meaning updates and access to the future capabilities – including AI features and the Automation Studio – will integrate seamlessly and naturally into their operations upon request at no extra cost.”
Meanwhile, Ten-25 has just taken the platform on which Merchanter is written up a generation, rolling it out from the beginning of July.
“It’s going to open up some exciting things for the product offer in the future,” said Mr Oldrey. “It’s going to make it a lot easier to have mobile apps as part of the system and the first one we’re doing is a driver delivery app.
“There are also going to be stock taking apps, rep apps and moving on to customerfacing apps,” he said. “These will be ones where customers can place and track their own orders and so on from mobile devices.”
Improved security, such as two factor authentication will also be available.
“The more secure we can make data while still making systems accessible and easy for the people who should be using it to use, then so much the better,” said Mr Oldrey.
“A whole programme of improvements are going to start to come through – there’ll be some cool stuff there.”
KCS is rolling out a new version of K8 on the latest global platform.
“We’ve deployed it now in the UK in about 30% of our customer base, with more following,” said Mr Mitchell. “We also release monthly updates to this product, with some incremental changes.
“It really benefits from our global R&D resources. For example, one feature we’re bringing into K8 is an offline point of sale capability, which will be launched later this summer. What this gives our customers is the ability to still trade in the branch even if they have lost access from the point of sale to their server. So, if the network connection is down, you can still transact with your customer. This offline capability is synced with K8, so customers’ prices and terms and so on are all synced. There’s no disruption as far as the customer being served at the counter is concerned and, when connectivity is restored, it replays the transaction log to the main server, so no manual uploading of any transactions is necessary.
“We’ve developed that capability for some of our markets where communications are not so robust, in particular, South Africa and Canada,” said Mr Mitchell. “South Africa, because the economy is volatile and there are things like power savings, or load shedding, that force power cuts in different parts of the country, which can affect connectivity to cloud systems. And in Canada there are times when communications start failing because of very poor weather conditions.
“Another feature we will introduce is customer facing displays in store, so rich product content such as images and specifications can be easily shared with customers at the counter,” added Mr Mitchell. “We’re also planning a refresh of the UI (user interface). Our goal there is to reduce training time for our customers to use the product, making it even easier and more intuitive.”
In other developments across the sector, partner integrations are very much part of the mix for ERP providers.
“We’ve introduced a new product to manage shared services, which we’re now starting to use in a number of different places and adding partner integrations all the time,” said Mr Mitchell. “We are currently forging an integration with a shipping provider and are also adding another provider for purchase ledger invoice registration and matching. And there will be more throughout the year.
“We look to partner with companies where our customers want to invest in their solutions, enabling them to integrate into our application and gain benefit from that integration,” he continued. “It’s important that, as well as facilitating that ease of connectivity with partners, it enables us to be very quick to react to demand.”
Ten-25 has also continued to link into more third-party e-commerce platforms.
“We’ve continued to link into more e-commerce platforms and have just finished off one called ShopWired,” said Mr Oldrey. “We’re working on another three at the moment and they’ll come after we’ve moved the platform up.
“We’ve started to do integrations into other platforms as well,” he continued. “For example, we’re offering NearSt to clients – a great service where people can effectively promote their products on Google to a geography local to where they are.”
He added that while it was good for companies to have their own in-house web shops, being able to utilise broader channels of sales, such as eBay and Amazon and marketing through NearSt and similar platforms was both effective and increasingly popular.
“It suits some businesses more than others, but I think as consumers we all use a lot of this sort of technology to drive those buying decisions. For example, a customer is probably less likely to Google ‘where’s the nearest timber merchant to me’, and more likely to Google ‘I need some timber battens’. NearSt comes up with a merchant in the area that has them in stock and at so much a metre.
“We have clients working with it who have said it has a multiplier effect. Customers look up one product they need to source, then come into the store and buy additional materials. One client told me they’ve had people who’ve come in for one relatively modest thing, realised they sold kitchens and bathrooms and bought a kitchen!”
Some of the more nebulous developments in the IT world have become less so as the years have passed. Take the cloud, for example – viewed with suspicion at the beginning but now widely accepted as an integral part of both business and leisure pursuits. There are still some who remain to be convinced, however.
Epicor reports that BisTrack as a cloud solution has become the majority choice “by clear margins” but that a handful of businesses aren’t ready for it, “invariably due to a lack of understanding, trust, or concerns over cost versus value”, according to Adam Lee.
“Today, we are providing BisTrack predominantly as a SaaS solution via the Microsoft Azure platform, a recognised ‘best-in-class’ cloud option,” said Mr Lee. “Additionally, with BisTrack imminently to be released as a 100% browser-based option, we expect this trend to continue.
“The scalability, performance, resilience and security of cloud is very much front of mind. Our application itself is tuned, optimised and best maintained by our team when delivered via our cloud. This provides customers with a more holistic support and all-round better service.”
KCS says it is investing significantly in the cloud and security.
“Although all of our latest customer solutions go straight to the cloud, many of our existing customers are migrating across into the cloud from traditional on-premise servers,” said Mr Mitchell. “Nothing new there really, that trend has been happening for 10 years. But it’s now happening at a faster pace and that’s because of the amount of money that businesses now need to invest around security. The investment in security needed to protect your business is becoming quite prohibitive for a single company, whereas customers investing in our cloud solutions get that data security as part of the service.”
Another somewhat intangible concept that has grabbed the headlines in recent times is artificial intelligence (AI) – a term that was coined way back in the 1950s.
“AI is the single most discussed and prioritised topic in our industry, viewed through the lens of a technology provider,” said Epicor’s Adam Lee. “Since the arrival of ChatGPT in late 2022 there has been a noticeable surge of interest and engagement. Epicor has invested heavily in this area, focusing on ‘use cases’ for AI that our customers are prioritising.
“For instance, we’ve developed Knowledge Assistants – AI-powered bots that can generate actionable answers based on natural language inputs, both written and spoken. Our acquisitions in this space, such as Smart Software and Grow.com have accelerated our journey to provide ‘cognitive ERP’.
“This evolution transforms ERP from a system of record to a system of action with AI-powered insights and predictions,” added Mr Lee. “There’s a long list of use cases including price optimisation, order intake automation, inventory optimisation and prediction, delivery route and load optimisation and many more. Our scale as a business allows us to invest in these technologies, enabling our customers to take advantage of the power of AI without needing to spend vast amounts of time, money, or resources.”
Mr Lee said that integrating the Grow Inc platform with BisTrack is central to Epicor’s strategy, enabling the aggregation and storage of data, both from its own platforms (such as BisTrack), but also from varied external inputs, Excel spreadsheets, third-party databases and so on.
“This data can then be accessed via low code/no code data pipelines, leveraging AI to provide actionable insights,” said Mr Lee. “Think of it as identifying the signal among the noise – we can spot the anomalies or trends, and the Cognitive ERP, powered by AI can recommend actions. For example, we can overlay weather or regional data on top of sales data to suggest recommended products for sale or purchase.”
Other software providers are keeping a very watchful eye on AI – keen to exploit its potential where it can bring benefits to customers but, as Ian Oldrey puts it, “not crowbarring AI into the system for the sake of it, for a bit of razzamatazz”.
“There are times when I have used AI over the last year and I have been genuinely impressed,” he said. “I think it will improve and there will be a place for it and it will do the majority of the heavy lifting. But there are still going to be times when customers want that human interaction.”
The rise of AI will certainly present both challenges and opportunities for businesses in the future, says Epicor.
“The rapid evolution of AI is both exhilarating and challenging,” said Adam Lee. “Even as a significant software provider with annual revenues exceeding US$1bn, we recognise the necessity of forming strong partnerships and collaborations with tech giants like Microsoft to remain at the forefront of innovation. The productivity gains and the creative opportunities for those who invest in AI and develop relevant skills are tremendously exciting. However, the economic conditions that our clients are operating in are absolutely key.”
Those economic conditions may or may not improve with the advent of a new government, but Ian Oldrey believes that, whether people agree with the new government’s policies or not, change will be seen as refreshing.
“Hopefully a lot of commercial opportunity will be released by virtue of that decision being made and some confidence moving forward,” he said.
