$2 Million in Growth: The Korte Does It All Story

About Korte Does It All

Korte Does It All Heating, Cooling, Electrical, Plumbing has served the greater Fort Wayne, Indiana area for 60 years, tracing back to 1965. The company operates on a "one call does it all" model, offering heating, cooling, plumbing, electrical, and sewer and drain services under one roof, backed by licensed, background-checked technicians and 24/7 emergency service.

Adam Furtado is the company's warehouse operations manager, also overseeing purchasing and install coordination for a business Adam estimates at around $30 million.

The Challenge

Before Ply, inventory tracking at Korte ran entirely on paper. "Tracking inventory was a nightmare," Adam says. "The reason was because we were very archaic, using a lot of paper." Receiving paperwork, packing slips, and forms technicians filled out for items they took all had to be processed by hand by a warehouse associate, a setup Adam describes as "a train wreck." Paperwork went missing, data entry errors crept in, and both cost time and money.

Bringing in new software wasn't really a question of whether it would help. "There was no 'is this going to help our business.' I knew it was going to help our business," Adam says. The real challenge was getting a 60-year-old company, with technicians who weren't always comfortable with new technology, to actually change how they worked. "Getting people to change and adapt is not only a physical limitation for some people but is also a psychological change."

Technicians turned out to be easier to win over than expected, mainly because they already knew the old process wasn't working. "What I found in talking with all the technicians is that the current way of requesting material and equipment, they already knew was not working," Adam says. "If I could bring you a tool and a resource that would eliminate some of those problems and make this job easier for you, would you be open to trying it? And the answer was always yes."

The Solution

Adam's first priority was making it easier for technicians to request material, cutting out the walk-the-shelves-and-write-it-down process that was generating disorganized stacks of paper. "Making it easier for the technicians to know how to easily request material and start to make those paper trails disappear was priority number one," Adam says.

The rollout was deliberate rather than all at once. Before technicians could use Ply's barcode scanning, Adam spent the first two weeks manually barcoding the warehouse. "The first two weeks was me barcoding 3,000 items in my warehouse and getting the entire footprint ready for Ply," he says. From there, he piloted with a single team, gathered feedback, and expanded team by team until the whole company was on the platform. Usage has climbed to roughly 5,000 field requests since the initial rollout.

We've been able to be more efficient, service the customer more, improve the process more, all because of Ply.

Adam Furtado, Warehouse Operations Manager at Korte Does It All

One feature became a favorite almost by accident. Ply's replenishment tracking lets Adam flag only the items that matter most for low-stock and overstock alerts, rather than trying to track his entire catalog. "The way that I had it set up before, it was showing 16,000 items in my full catalog and trying to track every single one of those," Adam says. "Once I realized what it was doing... I ended up turning that feature off and only turning it on for the things that were really relevant, and I haven't run out of anything since."

Ply's anomaly reporting caught something Adam might otherwise have spent hours chasing down. While reporting monthly inventory totals to finance, he noticed refrigerant inventory value had jumped unexpectedly. An alert pointed him straight to the cause: a unit-of-measure error had caused incoming refrigerant to be logged by the pound instead of by the jug, inflating inventory value by $50,000. "Had it not been for that anomaly report, I may have been spending hours deep diving where that change had happened," Adam says.

Support has been consistently responsive, according to Adam, whether through direct contact or Ply's feature request pipeline. "They'll never leave you on hold very long," he says. "I've also never run into a problem where they say they're going to get back to me, and they never do." Internally, Adam runs team-by-team roundtables to gather feedback, and says response has been "overwhelmingly positive" across the board.

The Results

• "I think it took Ply 90 days to pay for itself," Adam says. His reasoning: manual paperwork was costing two associates two hours a day each, the equivalent of half a full-time role. Freeing up that time let him reduce a part-time headcount, and the savings from that reduction covered the cost of Ply. "Reducing that headcount and the cost at which I was paying every year goes towards the price of paying for Ply," he says.
• The numbers moved fast once Ply was in place. Asked separately about the broader business impact since the rollout, Adam pointed to gains at a bigger scale: "We have reduced our headcount by 50%. We have increased our revenue by $2 million and been able to reduce our overall warehouse inventory by $200,000."
• Material pulls that used to take 20 to 30 minutes now take about three clicks. Previously, a technician filled out a form and an associate manually entered it into a spreadsheet to adjust inventory. Now the whole transaction happens in Ply in real time.
• Two hours a day given back per associate. What used to require sitting down at the end of each day to reconcile a full day's paperwork against an Excel spreadsheet is now handled in real time as items are received and used. That freed-up time now goes toward warehouse upkeep and other tasks.
• A $50,000 inventory error caught and resolved quickly, thanks to Ply's anomaly alerts flagging the unusual variance instead of Adam having to track it down manually.

Looking ahead, Adam expects continued growth for Korte in the Fort Wayne market and sees Ply's added communication features becoming an even bigger part of daily operations, potentially, in his words, "a one-stop shop for all the things that we need." His one regret is the delay before starting: "I started in March. I didn't get on Ply till August. I wish that I had gotten on Ply the day I started working here."