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50 • FOODSERVICE EQUIPMENT & SUPPLIES • MAY 2015 orders faster and faster. I think the WebstaurantStore keeps getting better and better every year." To help get products into customers' hands quicker, Clark Associ- ates continues to add distribution centers throughout the country. Today it operates eight distribution centers with another planned to open later this year. In ad- dition, the company recently added an overnight shift in its Nevada distribution center to keep orders fowing. Overall, the company has more than 1.5 million square feet of warehouse space. Like other aspects of the business, the WebstaurantStore embraces a constant improvement philosophy by monitoring a series of performance-based metrics including wait time on the phone, email response times, page load times from the website, errors and more. Even at the warehouse, associates who pack orders see a monitor that lets them know what is in their queue, the number of same-day shipments and more. But the WebstaurantStore does not limit the content necessary to create a good customer experience to the back end. Rather, Clark Associates invests heavily in developing foodservice equip- ment and supplies-related content that customers can access while visiting the WebstaurantStore's site. Clark Associates has an entire group of people dedicated to shooting photos and videos of the products it inventories and writing text that describes the features, benefts and technical specifcations of each item. "We want to be a resource and to edu- cate the customer about how to buy the product that is the best ft for them," Groff says. "Part of that is having the informa- tion or the content that helps customers really understand what they are buying." What's most ironic about all of the investments Clark Associates makes in the WebstaurantStore, and all of its distribution channels for that matter, is the fact that to the layman running a successful e-commerce business appears to be a low-cost endeavor. "I could not imagine something being farther from the truth," Groff says. "It takes a lot of overhead to make a website successful." Clark Associates continues to use technology to improve the fow of information between trading partners to better answer such issues as why an item is on backorder, why is it taking so long to ship an order and so forth. "Those are the things we are trying to improve and we are taking it one vendor at a time," Garber adds. And progress has been slow but steady. "From a stock ordering prospective, in the last three years, the big name vendors have really improved. But some of the smaller vendors are still lagging in the area of electronic data interchange ordering," Weaver says. "We try to sell them on the savings of getting it done. And a lot of vendors are still old school in terms of communication. Sometimes it takes weeks to get information that should take days." People By and large, Clark Associates is not a newcomer to the dealer community. The company got its start in 1971 and Prior to joining Clark Associates, Jim Stephens (left), president of the dealer's 11400 business unit, worked as an electrical contractor. This part of Clark Associates' business has only 10 employees but focuses on bid work, namely public money jobs such as school, hospital and military foodservice projects. The company handles such aspects of the job as scheduling, utilities, understanding how to work within construction practices and more.