Rusty Dargel of Dargel Boat Works, in Donna, Texas uses automation to manage a second generation marine retail, service and boat building business. Rusty will go down in history as one of the first to do inventory control, in real time, on a "micro-computer," as they were called in 1978.
The serial numbers feature was designed for tracking the sales and inventory of high dollar units like boats, motors and trailers. These units are unique. They come in once and are sold once. Each is a little different... different color, cost, date of arrival, and optional equipment. The units may be on some type of floor plan. Rusty probably has equity in them.
He tracks the customer by name and the unit by serial number and determines the exact profit at the time of sale.
Most of the outboard motor manufacturers, OMC, Mercury and Volvo, have their inventory on disks. These are large inventories, some 20,000 items or so each. Some accessory suppliers have their catalogs on disk.
The marine business is the most complex of all. Managing the parts inventory requires tracking 10,000 to 80,000 items from many different manufacturers over the past 75 years. The system has to keep a trail of "superseded" part numbers for each item that has been replaced. When a customer asks for the part by the old number, the system can march right up the trail to determine the current part number.
Managing boats, motors and trailers means high dollar serialized units which may all be different in cost, color, and options.
Floor planning, financing and insurance are involved.
There is a service department for getting new units ready, repairing old units, and adding optional equipment to units. Employees must know engines, rigging, electrical, trailers, painting and fiberglass repair.
Sales people do quotes, loan calculations, insurance, and are paid commissions. Training and lessons for buyers are often necessary, especially for sailboats. They get into show business at least once a year at the annual boat show. Many dealers also store boats and send regular statements. All this information must go to accounts receivable, accounts payable and a general ledger.
Rusty sums it up: "Mainly, it made our job so much easier by automating all the mundane tasks we used to have to do by hand; tracking inventory, updating pricing, sales reports, purchase orders, price tags, pulling cards and writing by hand."
He continues, " I can't even imagine going back to doing it by hand. It would take more labor, and trying to figure out what to stock and what not to would take so much more time. More people now are accepting computers and realize they can hit the wrong key and not blow something up. The most time consuming part of getting started is getting all the inventory in. Once you have the parts in, you solve all the other problems."
" The reports are worth their weight in gold. I don't have to rely on memory to get a feel for inventory movement. I keep at least five years of history so I can compare and track trends by item. If someone asks me about computerizing their business I say, "Go for it!" Just find a program that is easy to use. Some of them are so complicated they require you to go to annual meetings and training. I hear complaints about software that is so complicated to understand and which really gives you too much junk you don't need. I want to continue working toward the goal of having all the operations; sales, accounting, financing and insurance under one program."
I guess all the work mentioned above wasn't enough for Rusty. He also manufactures his own line of boats.