Cain & Bultman, Inc.

About Cain & Bultman, Inc.

Cain & Bultman, Inc. is a family-owned floor-covering distributor servicing the southeastern United States. Founded in 1924, the business is over 100 years old and has a rich history of high-quality service and customer satisfaction.

Today, the company supplies top-quality products to retail and commercial flooring dealers throughout Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and Alabama. In addition to its wide range of product offerings, the business also provides sales, marketing and logistical services for the flooring industry's top brand manufacturers.

Challenge

Cain & Bultman services the entire Southeast, even offering “next day” delivery to its customers. This large scope means it's important that orders are processed quickly and accurately. Another crucial element of efficient order fulfillment is warehouse management. Cain & Bultman needs to be confident that they can provide the right product at the right time, all while managing margins and tracking profitability.

Overall, the company’s priority is to provide value-added products and services as well as exceptional customer experience. Accomplishing this goal requires a robust system with advanced order processing and warehouse management capabilities.

Solution

Cain & Bultman is one of the longest-standing Kerridge Commercial Systems (KCS) customers in North America, as the company originally implemented the Dancik software solution in 1996. After Dancik was acquired by KCS in 2016, Cain & Bultman opted to upgrade the system to KCS’s Navigator business management solution and began implementing it throughout the company in 2022.

Cain & Bultman use Navigator for its order processing capabilities. The company can process customer orders quickly and easily within Navigator, regardless of what sales channel the order comes through (phone or email, over the counter, via the Internet, etc.). The solution allocates the right shade, dye lot, roll or piece from the right distribution point without any user decision based upon configurable system rules. This automation is especially beneficial for floor-covering distributors like Cain & Bultman, as it saves time, labor and costs.

Navigator allows our business to process multi-channel orders with the click of a few buttons. The back-end automation makes our jobs so much easier and provides us with greater trust in the order process.

Dave Tripp - Director of IT at Cain & Bultman

The company opted to also incorporate the Integrated Warehouse Management System (IWMS) add-on to improve its warehouse management. Instead of wasting time with manual stock management processes, IWMS gives Cain & Bultman a comprehensive view of real-time stock information like product availability.

The integration of IWMS and Navigator has allowed our business to have fuller visibility of our stock levels while ensuring we meet our consumers' demand.

Dave Tripp - Director of IT at Cain & Bultman

The IWMS solution seamlessly integrates with the Navigator system, allowing the business to make informed decisions and meet consumer demands. It also makes it easier for Cain & Bultman to pull inventory, as IWMS automates activities like picking to reduce the manpower required to perform warehouse tasks. IWMS ensures that, once an order is received, the correct product (in the correct amount) is available to pull and process for delivery as efficiently as possible.

We recently spoke with Dave Tripp, director of IT at Cain & Bultman, who has been with the company for almost 43 years. When we asked Dave about his experience over the years, he explained that it’s the people–in addition to the software’s functionality–that set KCS apart.

The people at KCS are great and give it their all. It is the strong customer relationship management that has kept us with KCS all these years. They ensure we can run our business in the most efficient and profitable way possible.

Dave Tripp - Director of IT at Cain & Bultman

Benefits

• Easy-to-use software interface
• Access to real-time workflow and inventory information
• Efficient order processing
• Automated receiving, picking, staging and shipping
• Enhanced storage utilization and inventory accuracy
• Improved customer service via an optimized workflow