The Solution
Phantom Fireworks is known for offering competitive deals, promotions, and coupons, and is consistently called on to match competitors’ prices. However, to ensure that it offers the lowest price and best deals, Phantom Fireworks’ system needs to automatically set competitive deals in advance for all its stores across the country. This would help streamline processes, particularly during the company’s busy season leading up to July 4th.

Customer Inventory tracking is also extremely important for Phantom Fireworks as each state has different laws and regulations around the sale of fireworks, requiring a separate business model for each state. Because of this, Phantom Fireworks needs to merge all this disparate activity into one financial schematic. As part of the company’s ecommerce/POS, order and customer inventory management was extremely time and labor intensive—creating a delay in activity by 24 to 48 hours.

As the company continued to grow its operations across 59 retail locations and a dozen warehouse locations throughout the U.S., Phantom Fireworks needed all these locations to work on the same ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software. The Board of Directors at Phantom Fireworks set out to deploy ERP software that would let them track and receive inventory.

After evaluating several solutions from various companies, Phantom Fireworks selected VAI S2K. The company determined that with its clean interface, low cost, and high performance, S2K was the ideal solution for Phantom Fireworks. The implementation of VAI’s POS system was seamless and fast—and after the first retail store converted, Phantom Fireworks rolled out the solution on an average of two stores every week.

After implementing VAI ERP, Phantom Fireworks’ sales increased between three and five percent during the busy July 4th time, with the system easily managing the high volume of sales. Because of the solution’s friendly user-interface, training employees on VAI S2K was simple, reducing training time from three days to a single afternoon—enabling employees to focus on their jobs rather than learning a new software system.

Because of its business sector, Phantom Fireworks was faced with maintaining regulatory compliance with PCI (Payment Card Industry). However, since upgrading and maintaining compliance is expensive, VAI’s partnership with a third-party credit card payment solution was particularly attractive to Phantom Fireworks because it enabled the company to ensure the security of all payment transactions and help maintain PCI compliance.

Furthermore, in early January 2012, Michigan legalized the sale of fireworks—providing a significant opportunity for Phantom Fireworks and the need to act quickly. With the help of VAI and the S2K solution, Phantom Fireworks was able to open three retail stores in Michigan in just two weeks.

The deployment of VAI S2K ERP has been so successful for Phantom Fireworks that it plans to extend the use of S2K to include VAI’s Warehouse Management System (WMS). Phantom Fireworks is also moving into a new million square foot plant in Warren, Ohio, where it plans to implement WMS to create the wireless network and begin scanning.

The Result
Mike Koocher, CIO of Phantom Fireworks, couldn’t be happier with VAI S2K. “With VAI ERP, we’ve significantly enhanced our inventory accuracy, enabling us to increase sales and improve uptime across all retail stores during the busiest—and most important—time of year. VAI S2K is helping to streamline our business and sales cycles more efficiently with its easy-to-use modules. We’re excited with the results so far and look forward to further expanding our use of the S2K technology.”

Since the launch, Phantom Fireworks has been using VAI’s ERP Software to:

• Maintain PCI Compliance
• Set up advanced, competitive prices for all of its stores
• Increase sales between three and five percent during the busy July 4th time
• Streamline business processes
• Enhance inventory accuracy