Spruce Computer Systems

Spruce Computer Systems is celebrating its 25th anniversary in 2010, marking a quarter century of service to Hardware and LBM dealers. During that time, the company has grown steadily through a combination of cutting edge technology, fair pricing and unparalleled software support.

“Spruce Computer Systems was begun in 1985 when a group of 19 Lumber, Hardware and Building Material Dealers got together and set up the company,” said Rob Fitzpatrick, company President. “At the time, the dealers all shared a common problem: they couldn’t find software that met their needs.”

The company wrote a new UNIX based software suite, and it came with 7×24x365 emergency support, one of many industry firsts for Spruce. PC connectivity, takeoff interfaces, e-commerce, RF devices for Drive-through Warehouses, and a SQL toolset are all examples of Spruce innovations that were later picked up by competitors.

In 2006, after a three-year development effort, Spruce released SpruceWare.NET, an all-new, all-Windows business management software package designed and coded from the ground up in Microsoft’s Visual Studio.NET platform and with a SQL Server database structure. With its built-in document management, highly intuitive interface, unlimited file attachments, powerful dashboard, dynamic reporting, and a host of other advanced features, SpruceWare.NET carries Spruce’s tradition of innovation and fair pricing into the new decade and into Spruce’s 25th anniversary year.

“Many of our competitors continue to add .NET elements, client interfaces, and the like to their older software platforms,” said John LaFave, Director of Marketing. “But SpruceWare.NET is the only software package available in the industry that’s 100% .NET—no unsupported Visual Basic 6 or other, even older tools. This gives us a significant technological edge, and it is part of the reason our growth has continued unabated during this less-than-favorable economic climate.”

Spruce has continued to thrive through tough economic times and intense industry consolidation. The company has run in the black for 20 years and has been debt free for the last 16 years even while funding the massive SpruceWare.NET R&D effort. During its history, it has lost less than 1% of its customers while growing at an average 11% rate per year. Much of this growth has come through word of mouth, a result of not only intuitive, highly practical software but also of dependable support and the attitude that its customers are its most important partners. As one of the only truly independent software providers in the industry, Spruce has a unique understanding of the needs of its independently owned customer base, and the fact that it is now over 70% employee-owned means employees have a solid stake in exceptional customer service.