Profile:

Elkhart, Indiana company manufactures and distributes high-quality, innovative products and accessories for the RV, Marine, Commercial Roofing and Housing industries. Founded in 1984, Alpha Systems employs approximately 170 people.

Objective:

Alpha Systems operates on very tight gross and net margins in highly-competitive industries and is always seeking to improve its operating margins. Management was interested in assessing savings opportunities in a number of cost areas to help grow its profits as well as lower its operating costs to win more business.

Annual Savings Implemented:

• Freight Costs: Accretive brought in Expense Reduction Analysts (ERA) to assess and help us implement significant savings by consolidating some our vendor base and re-thinking some of our freight lanes. The ideas we elected to implement saved us approximately 15% of our prior freight spend level.
• Small Parcel: One of Accretive’s “subject matter experts” in this area quickly identified 16-18% savings opportunity by doing a full scale assessment of this area and helped us implement the strategies that produced the savings.

Cost areas we are still assessing (as of Jan 2014):

• Factory consumables
• Others to be determined

Areas validated (immaterial or no savings):

Accretive assessed our utilities costs but determined that the Company was doing a very good job in this areas and any potential savings were not material enough to pursue. This is also considered a positive outcome since it validated the team’s efforts to contain cost.

“I have been impressed with Accretive’s process and the experts they bring to the table. The time our staff invests in the projects is minimal and we are able to avoid conducting a trial-and-error approach to picking the right experts in each cost category. Accretive has done that already and I have come to trust their judgment in selecting the “best-in-class” to help in each area.
So far… so good!”

Chris Kintzele, CFO – Alpha Systems

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