Manion’s Wholesale Building Supplies

The Company: About Manion’s Wholesale Building Supplies

Manion’s Wholesale Building Supplies got its start in 1980, when Rob Manion’s father and a couple of uncles began selling building materials out of a pickup truck and a fifth wheel trailer, picking up product at night and delivering it the next day. 

The company has since grown from its original Superior, Wisconsin location to four locations total, adding a second site in St. Cloud in the mid 1990s. 

Today Manion’s employs roughly 300 people and covers Minnesota, most of Wisconsin, parts of North and South Dakota, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The company is also a member of the American Building Material Distributors Association (ABMDA), which endorses Epicor as a technology partner for independent two-step distributors.

The Situation: Outgrowing a Patchwork System

For years, Manion’s ran on paper and pencil, and even after adopting its first real ERP system in the mid 2010s, the company customized that system so extensively that it eventually became impossible to update. The bigger problem was structural. Each of Manion’s four locations operated independently, producing separate sets of numbers that were difficult to analyze together as a whole business.

Rob Manion and his team evaluated several ERP vendors before choosing Epicor. Dave Carlson, Manion’s ERP Manager, said Epicor offered features the other vendors didn’t. Implementation was still a significant undertaking. The company had run its previous software for 15 years, and getting 300 employees to adopt a new way of working was no small task.

The Solution: Epicor BisTrack

Manion’s implemented Epicor BisTrack to replace its aging, over customized legacy system and bring all four locations onto a single platform. The move gave the company a level of cross-location visibility it had never had before, turning what used to be siloed, hard-to-compare data into a single, consistent source of truth.

The Results: Epicor BisTrack Implementation Benefits

The shift to BisTrack paid off in ways that Manion’s hadn’t fully anticipated. With real data behind them for the first time, the team could identify inefficiencies they had only suspected before and act on them directly.

Document handling is one clear example. Previously, if a customer called asking for a signed delivery document, staff had to dig through the file system, locate the paperwork, scan it, and email it over, a process that could eat up 20 minutes per request. Now staff simply right-click the sales order, pull up related documents, and email the scanned image on the spot. Multiply that time savings across a typical day of customer calls, and the impact adds up quickly.

Manion’s has cut paper consumption by roughly 70% across all four locations. Online orders have also grown substantially, from about 1% of business to around 20% over two years.

“Taking that leap of faith and moving to BisTrack has paid off exponentially,” said Rob Manion, CEO. ​“We have visibility we never had before.”

Looking ahead, the team sees more room to grow with Epicor. ​“We’re in the first part of peeling an onion,” said Dave Carlson. ​“Epicor is going to have solutions for us to solve problems we encounter going forward.”