Seventh Generation Inc. is a company
with a conscience. It markets environmentally friendly
non-toxic household cleaners, laundry and dish products;
100% recycled, non-chlorine bleached bathroom & facial
tissues, paper towels & napkins; plus recycled plastic
trash bags and full-spectrum light bulbs.
The company’s stated mission is “To
provide high-quality, non-toxic and environmentally responsible
products that are safer for your home, your neighborhood,
and the Earth's environment. We are dedicated to providing
products that work as well as or better than leading
brands, fit effortlessly into your everyday life, and
put a smile on your face whenever you use them.”
“Seventh Generation” is the nation's
leading brand of environmentally safe household products.
With distribution in thousands of natural product and
grocery stores nationwide, the company has become the
authority when it comes to products that protect people’s
health and the planet. Seventh Generation has won over
15 major awards that recognize the company’s efforts
to preserve the environment. The company name derives
from the great law of the Iroquois Indian Federation
that “In our every deliberation, we should consider the
impact of our decisions on the next seven generations.”
The company points with pride to the
impact of its products. For example: “if every household
in the U.S. replaced just one roll of 180-sheet, 2-ply
virgin fiber paper towels with Seventh Generation's 100%
recycled ones, we could save: 864,000 trees, 3.4 million
cubic feet of landfill space (equal to 3,900 full garbage
trucks) and 354 million gallons of water (a year's supply
for 10,100 families of four).”
Gene Cloutier, Controller of Seventh
Generation, uses EXEControl® from
Ebeling Associates as a complete software control package,
including accounts receivable, inventory, general ledger,
all order entry, inventory in multiple locations, and
shipping and invoicing.
“EXEControl is essential to us,” Cloutier
says, “we’re using it to better manage our company, both
top down and bottom up.”
“We need to look at our business in
a number of different ways,” he says. “For example, we
have four different bath tissues, paper towels, and paper
napkins. They all go into the paper category. But we
also need to look at that category by individual customer
and by marketing channels, such as natural foods stores,
grocery stores, and so forth.”
Cloutier adds, “We’re looking at both
sales and profitability, by individual item, group, customer
and distribution channel.”
“EXEControl is a key to helping us
do that,” Cloutier says. “With this software system,
we can look at how much we are spending for marketing
on various items. We can examine our total sales, total
sales by channel, and see what the margin is for each
channel. We can factor in consumer marketing, trade spending,
freight and warehousing, as well as general administrative
costs. The reports and information we need are available
in a few keystrokes.”
He says, “The key to the value of the
EXEControl system to Seventh Generation is that Ebeling
is customizing it to meet our needs exactly. Our EXEControl
representative understands the Ebeling product very well
and makes positive recommendations toward helping us
reach our goals. The system will do everything that we
want it to do, and our contact works with us to get where
we want to be.”
“By having a customer representative
who is ‘our’ representative, we get a lot of benefit:
when he comes to our location, we learn things about
the system that we didn’t know. He shows us how to take
advantage of the system based on his understanding of
how we work and how we want to work smarter. If there
is part of the system that needs to be reconfigured to
do what we want, our representative makes it happen.
As a result, we take greater advantage of the EXEControl
system so we can manage our business better.”
Cloutier says, “It’s very apparent
that Ebeling Associates has a corporate focus on making
sure that existing customers get full value out of their
system.”
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