How Gallagher Tire took control of their purchasing using Recurrency
ďťżGallagher Tire is a premier distributor of tires, wheels, and more. The brand is accessible at the best price points across sectors â from lawn care and farming to sports and construction.
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We sat down with JP Gallagher, President of Gallagher Tire and one of our earliest customers, to learn how Recurrency automates and optimizes its sales and purchasing workflows. We covered:
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âI deeply believe in Recurrency as a product. On the sales front, it was a natural fit. Iâm looking forward to the future of our companies working together.â
- JP Gallagher, Owner @ Gallagher Tire
As a family business, Gallagher Tire has been in operation since the â60s, and theyâve thrived for most of that time with zero data analytics tooling.
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However, as e-commerce has drastically accelerated and expanded in the last decade, every business has felt that squeeze, whether youâre an enterprise distributor, independent brand, or somewhere in between.
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The Gallagher Tire team soon realized they were being weighed down by their outdated stack.
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They eventually implemented a read-only business reporting and intelligence tool, which was a major step forward in terms of sales reporting and automating certain tasks like weekly emails.
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At the same time, JP admits that the BI tool didnât provide his company with the edge they were hoping for. They were still missing capabilities that could further simplify data processes, maximize every possible path to greater ROI, and help their team use their insights in their workflows.
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âAs a distributor, our customer data is critical. Despite that, our stack was getting weighed down. Basic data automation was highly manual and unproductive.â
- JP Gallagher, Owner @ Gallagher Tire
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It wasnât until Recurrency that they found this functionality and felt their stack was complete.
The last 2+ years of the global pandemic, paired with current market conditions, have uniquely dialed up the pressure on distributors. When asked how Gallagher Tire felt the effects, JP simply said, âI donât know if we have the time to unpack all of that.â
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At a glance, purchasing became a constant gamble, as the team could expect shipments to take anywhere from 2â3 weeks to 3â4 months. Even historically trustworthy and expedient vendors were unreliable. In his words, âDomestic production has been almost as bad as international production as far as lead times go.â
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Today, JPâs team is facing a potential buyer slowdown. Meanwhile, manufacturers are churning out and shipping far more product than the Gallagher Tire team has time to recalibrate.
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All of this culminates in a highly inflated inventory value.
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As a seasonal company, their current challenge is slimming down inventory so they can be as lean as possible entering Q4. According to JP, this wouldâve been downright unmanageable with their previous ERP setup.
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âFor a long time, we had no real data analytics or reporting. We couldnât zoom in based on specific SKUs or timeframes. And thatâs where Recurrency comes in.â
- JP Gallagher, Owner @ Gallagher Tire
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Once the Gallagher Tire team discovered Recurrency, they were hooked for two reasons.
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In JPâs words: âMy ears immediately perked up at the chance to reduce our reliance on P21.â
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He needed a system that was more robust and easier to navigate for his sales team. Today, Gallagher Tire is working toward switching their entire sales team off of P21, in favor of full-time Recurrency usage.
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Along those lines, JP was drawn to Recurrencyâs larger suite of automated solutions and ability to seamlessly extract data from P21. The subsequent integration and onboarding required little-to-no lift on their end.
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Our team at Recurrency made sure to provide as many tutorials and as much hands-on support as possible after the actual rollout to drive user acceptance at Gallagher Tire.
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In all, it took somewhere between a few weeks to one month for their sales team to start generating ideal outcomes with Recurrency.
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They were also a very early client, says JP, so that timeline would be even faster today.
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âGetting onboarded was very easy. The folks at Recurrency gave us everything we needed: live tutorials, video tutorials, whatever could boost user acceptance.â
- JP Gallagher, Owner @ Gallagher Tire
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After implementing Recurrency, the Gallagher Tire sales team fell in love with the âintuitivenessâ of our platform and its all-around ease of use. Some examples include:
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âWe have sales reps who are really driving our Recurrency usage. Theyâre thrilled with the intuitiveness of the software and its quick, easily interpretable data.â
- JP Gallagher, Owner @ Gallagher Tire
On the admin end, the Gallagher Tire team enjoys Recurrencyâs streamlined platform experience, which has led to significantly faster employee onboarding times.
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To efficiently sell thousands of SKUs, sales reps need to learn about inventory, customers, and the all-around state of the business.
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With P21, that meant a clunky, drawn-out process. Theyâd have to piece together disparate data on their own to gain a basic image of the company. JP estimates it took two months for each rep to onboard with P21 and start working productively.
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Their new stack of P21 and Recurrency cut that onboarding time in half.
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By displaying more comprehensive data in an easily interpretable form, Recurrency helps new hires get caught up with essential information while wasting less time and labor.
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Theyâre already actively pivoting to Recurrency as their lead, day-to-day software (in conjunction with MITS reports) â starting with onboarding for sales-specific roles.
On the other side of the table, utilizing Recurrency enables Gallagher Tire to deliver a faster, more accurate experience for their end users.
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Overall, the Gallagher Tire team will be able to work through more intensive sales flows with notably less lift. Thanks to Recurrency features like built-in task management, automatic data entry and reporting, reorder predictions, and more.
âThereâs a far better learning curve with Recurrency than with Epicor. Our goal is to remove those P21 licenses and get most of our sales reps on Recurrency.â
- JP Gallagher, Owner @ Gallagher Tire
Finally, JP emphasizes the Recurrency teamâs dedication to client support and their genuine love for the product theyâve built.
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Both of these attributes have unfortunately felt like rarities from a software vendor.
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For instance, he describes having to initiate weekly calls with one of Gallagher Tireâs IT partners for the last month or two. Theyâre not working on a large project, but JP has had to constantly push for the work to get done. In his words:
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âThat visible buy-in and support from Recurrency are just not present at every company.â
- JP Gallagher, Owner @ Gallagher Tire
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Since onboarding, the Gallagher Tire and Recurrency teams have kept up with monthly calls and weekly emails about usage and platform updates.
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Before switching to our platform, the Gallagher Tire team had to outsource to another company because Epicorâs turnaround on feature requests was simply âso bad to begin with,â as JP puts it. Their longest wait time was roughly three weeks.
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Conversely, he describes his experience with Recurrency so far:
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âIf we make a feature request, the answer from Recurrency is usually âyesâ. Even if itâs a ânoâ, they explain why. And itâs usually just a technical element we havenât thought of.â
- JP Gallagher, Owner @ Gallagher Tire
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Since Gallagher Tire officially rolled out Recurrency, weâve developed and implemented six unique features based on their requests (roughly one feature per month).
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âThe reception and willingness to listen from the Recurrency team is fantastic. They eagerly want to improve their product for every one of their customers.â
- JP Gallagher, Owner @ Gallagher Tire
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