Loeb Electric’s Custom Digital Innovations Meet Unique Sales, Customer Needs

• Senior Software Developer Gary Knight leverages his past-experience in marketing and inside sales to develop solutions for Loeb’s sales staff and customers. 

• Knight and his team developed a QR code system to help Walmart stores manage their lighting retrofits.  

• Loeb will whittle its two ERP platforms down to one under Knight’s direction. 

•  He’s also working on a custom app for Loeb’s labor services team for dispatches and the management of vendors.

Whether it’s helping Loeb Electric’s employees to transition to work-from-home last year or coming up with a QR code program for Walmart, Gary Knight is pivotal cog in the company’s IT and software development. 

Knight, one of MDM’s five 2021 Digital Innovator award winners, brings a lot of first-hand inside sales and marketing knowledge to his job as Loeb’s senior software developer. Knight started out at as an inside salesperson for Loeb in 1998 before transitioning over to marketing for a few years. He was named to his current role in late 2019 after making the move to IT in 2016. 

“It’s actually been essential because those years gave me the opportunity to see some of the struggles that we dealt with, and some of the tools that we were lacking,” Knight says of his time in sales and marketing. “Not to mention that it helped me learn the business and learn what some of the demands of the business were and how our core ERP was able to fulfill those. 

“The challenge for me was always enhancing what was there and not reinventing the wheel. It was just enhancing it or plugging the holes that the original ERP wasn’t designed to fulfill. How can I take something that takes someone four hours to do and get it down to minutes? That’s where I just leverage technology and leverage our data to make it a tool that is better to engage with the customers.”

Knight had a laundry list of accomplishments on his nomination forms, including the creation and use of dynamic Microsoft Excel spreadsheets that query Loeb’s Epicor Eclipse-based ERP data to produce a variety of reports, summary invoices, bulk shipment reports and raw data extracts to help better service customers’ needs. 

“Gary has the unique qualification of understanding our sales process and customer needs and can relate that to designing technology to support our sales efforts,” said fellow Loeb Electric employee Scott Sarno in his nomination of Knight. “He is self-taught, and he is continuously learning.”

Knight used web app technology to build a server scripting page that will output an HTML table. He then employs Excel to go out and grab that table and pull it down into a spreadsheet in order to make it interactive. 

“We can program Excel to go out and say, ‘These are the variables that we’re looking for,’ and it’ll go out and grab the data, and just dump it down into a spreadsheet,” Knight says. “Then, at that point, we can build graphs and charts and put KPIs in place. It’s leveraging the web technologies to go out and be the best servant for what we need the solution to be.

“It actually has been a feather in our cap. I don’t know of any other distributor doing this. It’s simple because I can program the web page to take in a security key. To the end user, they’re just going into Excel and saying ‘Hey, refresh the table’ and then it goes out and grabs it and dumps it down to them. It becomes alive for them, and they don’t have to call us. They don’t have to log in anywhere. It’s just on-demand information.”

Making the move to work-from-home

When the pandemic hit last year, Knight and his team also used the company’s VPN connections to push out and install new, more robust and secure VPN clients for employees who had moved to remote work. 

Knight and his team of six employees also installed software that allowed them to conduct remote computer support with remote workers if any of those workers had a problem arise. Loeb also installed Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol to connect home employees with their in-office workstations.  

“We had a hybrid of different types of users,” Knight says. “We invested pretty heavily in  laptops and other mobile devices to help to get their needs met.”

While all of Loeb’s employees returned to work this year, Knight says his team is still using the Loeb support remote capabilities to fix in-office problems without needing to go by each employee’s office. 

Solving Walmart’s retrofit lighting problems

In the spring of 2019, Loeb and Knight kicked off a large project with Walmart. Walmart store employees were struggling with retrofit lighting material shipments landing on their loading docks without store managers knowing what to do with them. 

Knight and his supporting team members were able to develop a QR pallet solution for shipments going to a Walmart store. When customers scan the label, they are directed to a landing page that allows them to enter their store number and receive feedback on the project type, start dates and contractor contacts.

“All of this planning went into retrofitting lighting, but sometimes the communication didn’t always get down to the store level,” Knight says. “From the store’s point of view, they would just have a semi show up and put 14 skids of lighting fixtures on their back dock.”

Knight and his team came up with QR code labels that are simply attached to all the skids. Once a delivery showed up on the loading docks, store managers could just take out their remote devices, scan the QR code, and it would take them to a website. The website would tell them that their stores had been picked for a lighting retrofit. 

Loeb sends out packets with the QR code labels with each shipment. The packets also go to the contractors and give them all the materials and instructions that they need, and what to do with the various products that are going to get returned.

“It takes them to a one-page homepage, but it also gives them the opportunity to type in their store number, which would give them specifics about their project, who the installing contractor was and who the contact person at that firm was,” Knight says. “We took that self-service mentality to that next level where we walked the store through what was going to happen.”

Once a retrofit was completed, the contractors stuck different QR code labels onto the leftover materials that had been wrapped up and placed on the skids. 

 “Everything that needed to be recycled or disposed of was just left in the back room,” Knight says of leftover materials before the QR codes. “Some of this had monetary value and the stores would get frustrated and stick it outside, and then it would snow or rain.

“What we did on that side is we came up with another QR code label that the contractors stick on the outside of the skids that they would wrap-up. Then they would have a QR code scan that walked them through the pickup process. We tried to support the store at every stage of the process for a retrofit.”

Among other projects, Knight has implemented and updated more than 10 software programs. He was instrumental in the creation of Loeb’s e-commerce site, which in turn has enhanced sales and the company’s profitability. He also developed a work assignment board to monitor and communicate warehouse picking expectations, according to a nomination by co-worker Sabrina Ramsey.

ERP integration on deck

Going forward, Knight is working to consolidate Loeb’s two ERP platforms — one for its labor services branch and one for the company’s traditional distributorship — onto the Epicor Eclipse platform.

“Another thing that we’re going to be doing is write a custom app for our labor services team to do their dispatching, management of vendors and things like that,” Knight says. “It’s new area for us, but our current setup is not ideal for what we need to do.”

Knight says Loeb is taking a phased approach for retiring one of its ERP platforms. The final phase is scheduled for late 2022 or early 2023. Once that work is completed, Loeb will launch the app online. 

While Knight is largely self-taught, he’s driven to learn by customer and sales staff requests. He says he always makes a point of under-promising and over-delivering, the latter of which could include a new wrinkle or feature that wasn’t in the original requests. 

“I always try to put myself in their shoes as far as how I would use it,” he says. “If I wouldn’t want to use my software, why would I expect anybody else to want to? 

“Don’t be afraid to crash and burn,” he advises. “I have built my entire career out of the ashes of my failures. When somebody brings you a challenge, be bold with your suggestions and make sure you have the support to make those bold moves happen.”