Tag Archive for: sustainability

Turtle & Hughes: Women Building a Sustainable Future

Electricity powers our way of life. But with global warming an increasing threat to our world, everyone needs an energy partner that cares deeply about the environment, and leaders who are making an impact on progressing green energy solutions.  Turtle & Hughes, which has been woman-led for 80 years, is committed to working with customers to create a more sustainable climate future.

Founded in 1923, Turtle & Hughes are a fourth-generation, family-owned business – and one of the nation’s largest independent electrical and industrial distributors. Its Electrical division is a significant force in the engineering/procurement of power distribution, automation, lighting, and industrial infrastructure. Turtle & Hughes Integrated Supply (THIS) division provides on-site MRO procurement, cost-saving, and spend analytics operating across the U.S., and in Canada, Puerto Rico, and Mexico.

Sustainability Is Their Game

Turtle & Hughes is committed to creating a better climate future by building safer, smarter, cleaner communities. In their own words, “We deliver industry-leading products, services, and solutions to help customers reach their goals and create measurable impact for a greener world.”

There’s a push to embrace renewable energy and uncover breakthrough technologies that can lead to low and/or no carbon emissions. Turtle & Hughes believes that’s possible with the use of greener technologies including LED lighting, Energy Storage, EV Chargers, Solar & Wind, and other industrial Automation Tools,. A large undertaking for any organization but an attainable goal at the core of their business. Their 2021 ESG Report outlines Turtle’s bold commitment to drive sustainability throughout their business verticals and demonstrates their dedication to excellence and putting their people and partners at the center of all they do.

Starts From the Top

As a diverse company, inclusion is a fundamental part of Turtle’s success and it continues to help them grow. It has been a Certified Women’s Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC) member for over 25 years – and is one of a few electrical distribution companies in the US with female ownership and leadership.

Jayne Millard, Executive Chairman of the Board of Turtle & Hughes, is the third generation of women to lead the family business – she has made her mark on the industry. In 2020, she received the Women in Industry Trailblazer award from the National Association of Electrical Distributors (NAED). She was inducted into the Women’s Business Enterprise (WBE) Hall of Fame in 2021. These industry awards and accolades acknowledge her transformational leadership and dedication to growth. She cultivates a workplace environment based on the fundamental powers of respect and listening. Millard believes in mentoring other women to become strong leaders in the industry.

But Millard is not alone. In 2020, Kathleen Shanahan became the first non-family CEO in the company’s almost one-hundred-year history. As CEO, she has overseen the expansion of online sales to the global marketplace, CRM implementation, and enhanced business analytics. In 2020, she was named “CEO To Watch” by Family Business Magazine.

Where Commercient and Salesforce Fit In

With everything in their favor, Turtle has undergone a digital transformation to upgrade the customer experience and modernize its internal systems and sales processes to drive revenues and achieve efficiencies that maximize profits.

Two years ago, Turtle & Hughes implemented a state-of-the-art CRM to improve managing leads, opportunities, customers, marketing, and more. It leverages Salesforce Enterprise and chose Pardot for its marketing needs and Salesforce Inbox to modernize and improve sales.

“We’re going to add an automated process to Salesforce that follows up with any opportunities that we lose,” said Josh Green, Salesforce Administrator at Turtle & Hughes. “We’ll be able to turn those losses into future leads.”

The company utilizes Infor Distribution SX.e. for their operations and finance and needed a data integration between their ERP and Salesforce. Enter Commercient SYNC. They now can view more of their critical Infor Distribution SX.e data in one place, Salesforce. That includes supplier and customer information, sales orders, vendor invoices, etc.. SYNC also helps with the adoption of Salesforce by making the process automated and efficient.

“It’s quicker to access the ERP data in Salesforce so that it becomes more of a one-stop-shop for our team,” explained Green. “Additionally, we can create reports with the data, do automations, and put validations in place, so we can actually work with the data instead of just looking at it.”

Rundown of Commercient’s 2019

2019 is quickly drawing to a close. Let’s take the time to reflect on the year gone by with Commercient. Our company grew rapidly this year not only increasing our customer base but also our worldwide team. We hire talent from all over the world expanding our sales, support, IT and marketing teams. 

This year we’ve grown our partner channel by adding two major tech companies Intuit and HubSpot  in addition to the well over 80 Salesforce and Microsoft Consulting practices that also joined our partner network. If you would like to partner with us, please contact us.  In 2019 we launched two significant CRM exchanges, Zoho Marketplace and Sugar exchange. We also added 10 new Salesforce apps to our existing 16.  

In terms of technology, this year saw Commercient being awarded an Innovation Credit by Amazon Web Services. The Innovation Credit was used to roll out an AI-enhanced Commercient SYNC. This will deploy 4th generation technology to achieve more rapid implementations, enhanced customer experience, global market reach, and the ability to onboard many more customers faster.

We deployed a new AI program for data matching and deduplication, which is incredibly powerful, and therefore power-hungry. We required GPU cores to handle the millions of parallel operations needed to deliver intelligent decisions on how to match customers and products between systems. This process would have taken hours on traditional computers and servers, and add into that the human verification process.  The net result is that we can automate matching and deduplication of data in seconds instead of weeks, which is a huge help for new customers with disparate data between ERP and CRM systems.

On June 24, 2019 Commercient, won the Salesforce AppExchange Demo by popular vote! The 3-minute demo focused on SYNC, and was performed by Ken deLodzia, Commercient’s Senior Solutions Engineer. The AppExchange Demo Jam is a game show-style event where up to 8 Salesforce app partners perform a fast, 3-minute demo of their app. Attendees watching the demos vote for their favorite.

“The valuable data you guys are able to SYNC over is fantastic. Not only do you have the bi-directional SYNC going on, which is configurable as a one-way or two-way SYNC, but you are able to pull that data in a way that a customer service rep or a support rep is able to access, and utilize. Not only for the entitlement side, or the, ‘Hey, I need to get you a replacement order.’ You can see the order information from whatever ERP system you’re pulling from. Fantastic, very simple to use!”- Jeff Grosse, Salesforce MVP, and Demo Jam moderator.

Commercient was in attendance of multiple industry-leading conferences all over the world including Salesforce World Tour London, SYSPRO Wave, and Dreamforce.

Salesforce held its annual Dreamforce convention on November 19-22, 2019 in San Francisco. Our founders, Richard Jenkins, John Angove, and Corinne Allgaier as well as our Head of Partnerships Noah Thomas and Paul Barry, Senior Solutions Engineer were all in attendance. Over the four days, our team met with 18 potential customers, partners and loyal clients.

“Our customers love that we proactively monitor the synchronization” – John Angove CFO

As we prepare to close 2019, we reflect on Commercient’s place in the world as a global corporate citizen. At Commercient, with a global work staff, we believe in the ability of corporations to act as a platform for change, and we consider our collective roles as guardians of world climate health to be both urgent and critical. 

On a very practical basis, the urgency of the issue was brought home to us when Commercient CFOs were in Europe for a conference in July and were subjected to the intense heat waves across France, The Netherlands, and England. John Angove, Co-Founder, and his family were among those that became stuck on a train from Paris to Amsterdam. The railway lines were buckling, temperatures inside the carriage became intolerable and people were panicked. 

It is in this context that as individuals and as a corporation we strove in 2019 to make real and impactful contributions to conservation and climate efforts. In 2019 Commercient spread the joy by making contributions to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) when our customers gave us commendations. We participated in beach clean-ups, electronics recycling, climate protests,  and WWF campaigns. We got involved; our children got involved.

We’re thankful for all the opportunities we received in 2019 and all of the companies we managed to help with our SYNC solution. Don’t worry, it’s not too late to contact us if you are still looking for a data integration solution for 2019. 

NFC Cards: Sustainable Trade-Show Attendance With Electronic Business Cards

With 200,000 people attending Dreamforce in San Francisco this week, Commercient calculates that at least 15 business cards will change hands with each person in attendance. That equates to more than 3,000,000 business cards being handed out in one week alone, at one tradeshow.

What does this mean for the environment? 

Following its commitment with environmental causes and being on top of trending, emerging technologies, Commercient teamed up with Andres Espinoza from Affinity Business Cards to help reduce the use of wasteful paper business cards by replacing them with electronic business cards. 

How do NFC cards change the traditional concept of exchanging paper business cards at a trade show? Does it work? Besides helping the environment, electronic business cards ensure that the contact information you just shared with the person you just met is not lost. It’s stored in the cloud, so no matter how many flyers, printed business cards or promotional materials you carry, electronic business cards will keep that valuable information saved.

Richard Jenkins, Co-founder of Commercient, sees this “as a chance for trade show sponsors and attendees to comfortably reduce their paper waste while improving the digital interaction. In the Tradeshow industry the free giveaways, trinkets, toys, flyers and cards are commonly referred to as ‘landfill’ because that is where the vast majority ends up within a few days of the show, but we realized that it isn’t necessary.”

With the recent NFC capability across iOS and Android, and with QR as a backup, there is no need for paper flyers or paper business cards anymore. In fact printed paper materials are dead upon printing. 

“Within minutes of Andrew showing me the digital cards the light went on for sustainable trade-show attendance. With a touch of the NFC card to the phone we can push a website, contact card, LinkedIn profile, video, landing page, or flyer. Unlike printed paper cards, with NFC Affinity Business Cards we can update and refresh the information at any time. We are going to be doing our part to share information responsibly at tradeshows while reducing unnecessary waste,” he said. 

Richard Jenkins also stated that Commercient has a goal to be completely free of printed materials by 2020 for all trade shows. “At Dreamforce 2019 alone our Commercient team will reduce the use of over 1,000 business cards over a 5 day period.”

How Do NFC Cards Work?

  • * These are plastic business cards used to Tap against an Android or an iPhone (they also have a QR code for phone models that don’t have NFC chips). 
  • * It lets you send people your contact details with a tap or just point your camera at the QR on the back (no app required), without paper cards (this saves the environment and the landfill because peopel throw them out after a show). 
  • * This also lets you immediately say “great, now that my contact is on your screen, just shoot me a message and I will get back to you next week after the show”.

So no more lost business cards with valuable contact information. Partner with technology, get the most out of Dreamforce and other trade shows and create a positive environmental impact.