How MarkMagic Supplies Drop Shipping Capabilities to Help Top Notch Distributors Grow

700,000 Items. 70+ Manufacturers. One Form Creation Software Program to Unlock Value.

The Customer

Top Notch Distributors Inc. (TND) opened its doors in 1975. As a leader in cutting edge architectural door hardware and accessories, Top Notch has been relied upon by companies, both big and small for 40 years. Their diverse mix of products range from smart key locks to luxury door handles. With offices in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Missouri and Massachusetts, Top Notch has become a highly visible company with a presence across the United States.

What makes Top Notch so top notch? For starters, their vast inventory of 700,000 commercial and residential products sourced from more than 70 vendors. Door knockers, handles, bolts, cabinet hardware, knobs, deadbolts, hinges, and hardware tools are just some of the goods Top Notch has in stock. The wide breadth of Top Notch available products is the first thing that draws clients both big and small.

The Challenge

To serve a large and diverse customer base, TND has equally diverse needs for forms creation and management.  Some TND customers are smaller single store operations, while others are larger with multiple locations. When TND needed a new electronic document software program that supported their new virtual Brooktrout fax cards, the software needed to be as flexible as possible. Top Notch looked for a broad feature set in order to continue communicating with fax as well as add e-commerce forms capabilities.

In the past, the many forms and receipts TND had to print had to be designed by an outside source, a slow and costly method. It was not feasible for TND staff to create the forms because it was just too complicated and time consuming. TND needed a cost-effective, easy to learn solution that would empower them to create, design, and edit all their business critical documents in house, thereby saving money and time.

Top Notch also needed to be able to respond to the ever changing marketplace by responding to the demands of their growing e-commerce capability, both for consumers and resellers. For many of their resellers, Top Notch drop ships products to the reseller’s customers (warehousing products so the resellers do not have to).

TND looked for a solution that could handle fax communications with their smaller customers while supporting e-commerce sales with larger customers.  The solution needed to allow TND to dynamically create and edit electronic, plain paper forms and receipts quickly, without any errors or downtime. TND needed a solution that would allow them to continue to provide excellent service and grow their business, without having to manually edit a new form every time a new drop ship order comes in.

The Solution

According to Top Notch IT Director, Joe Hampton, “we needed to find new software that could be easily integrated with our virtualized infrastructure.” After analyzing several different software packages, CYBRA Corporation’s MarkMagic™ Bar Code Labels, RFID Tags, Electronic Forms, and Report Writing Software “was the best choice,” says Hampton. A key requirement for TND was that the software be powerful enough to “support the new virtual Brooktrout fax cards,” yet easy to learn and use, and require little programming knowledge.

Here are two examples of how CYBRA’s MarkMagic helps Top Notch offer a virtually unending catalog of products to their many customers.

According to TND’s ERP Systems Analyst, Linda O’Hara, “Most customers, suppliers, and resellers prefer to receive forms via email. But, we also have a lot of longtime customers that still prefer to receive their forms via fax.” TND uses the MarkMagic PDF E-mail/Fax Option to deliver MarkMagic documents to any e-mail or fax recipient. The Adobe PDF email attached files are searchable for words appearing in the text, and the bar codes in the PDF files are readable by bar code scanners. MarkMagic allows TND to eliminate printing and shipping printed forms to remote recipients.

When combined with the MarkMagic conditional printing option, PrintTransformer, TND’s files can be converted into a PDF and faxed, emailed, printed to a specific printer, or all of the above, without programming. All MarkMagic has to do is interrogate the data in the file and follow rules set up by the users to perform a wide range of forms management functions. This capability is “like conditional printing on steroids,” says Chuck Roskow, CYBRA VP of Operations, who helped TND convert to MarkMagic.

“TND allows their customers to act and do business like e-Commerce Superstars”, remarks Roskow.. With the PrintTransformer add-on option, TND can create and distribute forms with the correct information, while making it look as if it was sent out by their reseller customers.

Now, creating forms only takes a few minutes, and can be done in house. PrintTransformer dynamically prints out drop ship forms with the reseller’s logo and information.

The Benefits

According to TND’s ERP Systems Analyst, Linda O’Hara, “We’re shipping for our reseller customers, to their customers. MarkMagic automatically sends out forms with the correct customer logo on their packing list. To add a new reseller, we just add the reseller’s logo, and at print time, MarkMagic dynamically switches the logos along with some text on the packing list we use for all of our customers.” With the MarkMagic PrintTransformer option, there’s no need to design a different format for each customer.  One “template” can adjust itself on the fly to different customer requirements from logo to reseller specific return address and terms.  A huge benefit for TND, says O’Hara, is how easy it is to change logos with MarkMagic. “It’s something we can handle easily in house. Now, we don’t have to hand this off to a third party, we can just do it here at TND, saving time and money. Changing forms doesn’t take long at all and requires no programming.”

Saving time and money is how TND unlocked ROI (Return on Investment) with CYBRA’s MarkMagic.

Summary

Using CYBRA’s MarkMagic™ Bar Code Labels, RFID Tags, Electronic Forms, and Report Writing Software, Top Notch Distributors has been able to respond to the market’s demand for e-commerce sales without changing their forms creation process in any radical way. TND has expanded the number of reseller companies for whom they drop ship significantly since becoming MarkMagic users. All the while, maintaining fax communications and integrating with their e-commerce system with virtually no programming.