Case Study | Georgia Underground Superstore
When it comes to sourcing everything for utility contractors, Georgia Underground Superstore doesn’t just deliver, they’ve created the sourcing blueprint for the past 30+ years! With a unique business model, catering
to the special needs of utility contractors, their extensive 20,000+ item
catalog ensures that contractors have what they need, when they need it – making Georgia Underground the most trusted, one-stop shop for all equipment and supplies in the entire utility construction industry.
With an extensive product catalog and with over 200+ active customer accounts, the time required to manage large numbers of product purchases, quotes, and inventory tracking was pulling key team resources away from other strategic tasks.
So, when one of their largest customers approached the Sales Team requesting to have online access to their own dedicated catalog with special pricing, Georgia Underground had no viable, automated option to turn to.
Their current way of pricing, order processing, and invoicing for this large customer required that a sales rep manually look up each item in an order, note the special price, create the appropriate quote, send the quote to the customer, and manually process the order before finally emailing the final invoice. This process alone, for each order, took approximately 45 minutes to complete. And with 15-20 orders of this kind a week – the time spent managing just this one customer account easily exceeded 80+ hours of manual data entry a month.
The Georgia Underground Team wanted a reliable, fully automated, and cost effective way to create a custom online catalog for their largest customer that would enable them to seamlessly update pricing, add new items, and completely manage order processing and inventory tracking without the need for a single manual touchpoint.
“This integration alone has saved us from having to hire at least 2-3 new sales reps just to manage this one high volume customer account. What would have taken a significant amount of time now literally runs in the background with minimal maintenance needed from our team.”
Within a few weeks of the project kickoff, the Kissinger team implemented a Web-Stor integration between Georgia Underground’s new BigCommerce store and their Sage 100 ERP system. This enabled the company to create a customized eCommerce store for their largest customer—making this the first time in their 30+ year history that they were able to offer such a tailored solution. Not only did this dramatically reduce the manual data entry to process orders, but it gave their customer immediate visibility into Georgia Underground’s inventory, their own special pricing, and the ability to track all orders placed on their account from various utility contractors.
The Web-Stor integration with Sage 100 served to both increase operational efficiencies for the Georgia Underground Sales Team and streamline how payments were received from their customer – thereby shortening the “quote-to-cash” time cycle.
“This new solution made it easy for us to toggle items to be visible to our customer or not. Adding new items to the customer’s BigCommerce site is seamless and we can add new items with the correct margin automatically calculated within seconds. The Web-Stor integration for Sage 100 has also made invoice management much easier. Our customer can pay their invoices online instead of calling or sending us a check which has been a huge value add,” explains Josh Higley, Projects & IT Director for Georgia Underground Superstore.
Having a customized and fully integrated eCommerce store for their customer to purchase directly from has enabled the Georgia Underground Sales Team to reduce the time it takes to process a single order from 45 minutes to just 2 minutes (a 96% reduction!). And, instead of dedicating almost 80% of a full-time salesperson’s time to processing one customer’s orders, key staff now have the time to dedicate to other revenue-generating tasks, a benefit Georgia Underground has been experiencing since 2016, when the company began using the Web-Stor solution.
“This integration alone has saved us from having to hire at least 2-3 new sales reps just to manage this one high volume customer account. What would have taken a significant amount of time now literally runs in the background with minimal maintenance needed from our team,” adds Josh.
However, the key to the continued success of this project is in Georgia Underground’s 8+ year relationship with the Kissinger team.
“The Kissinger consultants are such an integral part of our IT team. Their level of professionalism and in-depth expertise is unmatched. They’re always helping us to explore new features we can add to Web-Stor to keep increasing our efficiency. Whenever we need something adjusted, Kissinger gets it done for us in 30 minutes or less. They understand how important this automation is for our customer and our team and it’s so refreshing knowing we have an IT partner we can trust,” Josh shares.
“The Kissinger consultants are such an integral part of our IT team. Their level of professionalism and in-depth expertise is unmatched. They’re always helping us to explore new features we can add to Web-Stor to keep increasing our efficiency. Whenever we need something adjusted, Kissinger gets it done for us in 30 minutes or less. They understand how important this automation is for our customer and our team and it’s so refreshing knowing we have an IT partner we can trust.”
Would your company benefit from complete eCommerce order automation?
"Everyone at Kissinger is easy to work with. They understood our needs and created an integrated solution that gives us exactly what we wanted."
— Jennifer Callanan at MMTC, Inc.
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