• Business: Dinuba Lumber
• Location: Dinuba, California
• Owner: Brooks Schaffer Jr.
• Years in business: 70 under family ownership

Dinuba Lumber has been selling lumber and building materials to residents of California’s central San Joaquin Valley for about 100 years. The Schaffer family has been in the lumber business since 1920 and owned the Dinuba Lumber since 1950. Since purchasing the business, it has added hardware to its product line and incorporated an equipment and concrete-to-go rental business, as well. When they needed a retail management solution to help them run their three-headed company, they turned to Paladin Data Corporation.

Paladin is the lynchpin that holds the company’s three distinct divisions – Dinuba Lumber, Ace Hardware and U-Do Rental – together.

Owner Brooks Schaffer Jr. and assistant manager Harmony Parker worked with Paladin, Volusion and Point of Rental, two of Paladin’s many specialty business management partners and integrations, to create an online portal where customers can reserve equipment that ranges from aerial lifts and air compressors to trenchers and welding equipment. The company uses Paladin to easily transition customers from renting equipment to purchasing lumber, building materials and hardware. It all happens with scan-and-go ease, avoids duplicating effort on separate systems, and it creates customer contact information in the store database.

Brooks’ favorite feature in the integration allows his store associates to shoot before-and-after photos of their rental equipment and attach them to the transaction record. The company rents a lot of trailer-haul concrete – ready mix in towable mixers – so monitoring the condition of the equipment when it is returned is crucial to the bottom line.

“It’s incredibly useful to have those photos. If there are any questions about whether or not the equipment was damaged when it was used, we can show them. It really encourages customers to take care of the equipment. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve had to chip (hardened) concrete off those things,” Brooks explains.

Having and integrated POS and rental system enables businesses to track and manage rental activity from the same checkout terminal where they sell lumber, hardware and take rental payments. It also provides multi-store functionality giving businesses the ability to track equipment, transactions and customers at the enterprise level across different divisions or locations.

Approximately 60% of Dinuba Lumber’s stock is from Ace Hardware with the remainder coming from specialty suppliers. Having Paladin’s Market Driven Inventory Management and easy-to-use retail platform simplifies all its business processes.

Whether its lumber, hardware or rentals, Paladin the perfect platform for any kind of business.

“We love Paladin. We made the right choices to select that company and the software that goes with them. They’ve been very good to us,” he says.