[ CLIENT SUCCESS ]

Hard and Soft Fishing: Growing a New DTC Revenue Stream

Industry

Manufacturing

Solution

Financial & Operational Systems

Client Since

2016

About Hard and Soft Fishing

Fishing fans across the country know Hard and Soft Fishing, Inc. through their venerable brands, including Acme Tackle, Beaver Dam, and Uncle Josh. The company’s origins date back to 1922 when two fishermen friends began using pork fat to make lures.

Today, the best-selling lures respect that history through names like “Big Daddy Pork Frog” and “Pork Nightcrawler.” Much has changed over the years, including a recent ownership change, with Hard and Soft Fishing now employee and investor owned. Today, the company is a modern enterprise that manufactures and distributes its products both through major retailers and directly to consumers. To ensure fishing enthusiasts everywhere have accurate fish tales to share, Hard and Soft Fishing relies on BT Partners.

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“With BT Partners’ help, we’ve grown what was just incremental business into a significant revenue stream for the company.”

Becky Beth

Chief Financial Officer, Hard and Soft Fishing

The challenge

The company had been using its ERP system for years, but it was poorly implemented and not optimized for their current needs. This limited visibility created inefficiencies in manufacturing, inventory, and distribution, and hindered their ability to scale effectively, especially as the direct-to-consumer channel grew rapidly during the pandemic.

Leadership needed a partner who could reimplement and optimize their core systems to support manufacturing tracking, inventory management, and seamless integration with eCommerce platforms. They also sought to improve warehouse workflows to handle increased order volume without proportional staff increases.

Why BT Partners?

Hard and Soft Fishing selected BT Partners after recommendations from other SYSPRO users. They were chosen for their strong reputation, proven expertise, and ability to deliver a complete reimplementation rather than a superficial fix.

BT Partners impressed with their collaborative style, technical capability, and focus on teaching the client to become self-sufficient.

CFO Becky Beth has nothing but praise for the consulting and engineering teams at BT Partners. “BT Partners is easy to work with. They are highly capable and enjoyable to collaborate with. In addition, they place a high value on teaching us to be self-sufficient, encouraging us to fully understand the software’s capabilities and be curious about what more we can do with it. That’s what I call a partner, not a vendor.”

The solution

BT Partners conducted a full evaluation and reimplementation of the company’s core ERP system. They optimized manufacturing processes, inventory management, and distribution workflows to better align with the company’s operations.

Key enhancements included building two-way integrations with Shopify and Amazon for seamless order and inventory synchronization, and implementing a smart scanning solution in the warehouse to automate shipping label generation and improve accuracy. BT Partners also provided ongoing consulting and training.

Beth says that BT Partners reimagined and reinvented the way the company uses SYSPRO — to great advantage. “We use SYSPRO to track our manufacturing processes, manage our inventory holdings, and keep distribution flowing. BT Partners is helping us make much better use of our technology and use its capabilities to grow the business.”

Results & business impact

The direct-to-consumer channel more than doubled, with only one additional employee needed, thanks to automated integrations and improved workflows. Warehouse order processing is now twice as fast and more accurate, replacing manual keyboard-based processes.

The optimized systems have transformed what was once incremental business into a significant revenue stream. The company gained better control over manufacturing, inventory, and multi-channel distribution while maintaining strong customer service levels.

What’s next

Hard and Soft Fishing continues to partner with BT Partners to further leverage their technology capabilities. The collaboration supports ongoing scaling, process improvements, and exploration of new opportunities as the company grows its manufacturing and distribution footprint.

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