case study Sweetmans Timber

Transcription

1 case study Sweetmans Timber 16 AUGUST 2016

2 Automated Customer Order Process Go Paperless Custom Apps helps Sweetmans Timber produce and deliver products faster Sweetmans Timber Sweetmans Timber has been producing quality Australian hardwood products since Based in the Hunter Valley, the fourth-generation family owned business, supplies more than 50,000 products and made-to-measure cut timber to meet client specifications. General Manager, Luke Crump, said Sweetmans Timber specialises in supplying long lengths of wood for structures including wharves and bridges. The business employs 22 staff and distributes their products to clients based predominately in New South Wales. The Challenge As a supplier to hardware stores and DIY clients, Sweetmans Timber receives a large number of sales orders per month for their standard and custom-made products. Luke said a key challenge for their business was to reduce time spent chasing sales order paperwork. It was all manual. Predominantly our orders come in by fax, even today, said Luke. We would then enter them into our system and then print copies for the production guys. We d write some of the details of the order on a whiteboard so we could track what orders we had, but it was all paper-driven. You were constantly chasing the paper. We just don t print them anymore. Luke said the paper trail impacted their ability to keep customers up-to-date on their orders, and at times lead to errors and even double orders. The first thing I wanted to address was transparency. The ability for when a customer rings to say, How s my order going?, reflected Luke. The paper-based system also presented some obvious challenges for the largely outdoor business. We had issues because (the order picking forms) would be out in the yard, they d get wet or they d tear corners off it to write a note, and then we re trying to scan it and the copier didn t like that, said Luke. This also meant at times we would reprint the picking slips and we would end up double picking order items.

3 The Solution Colourworks Australia presented a solution to Sweetmans Timber to move their sales order process from a manual to digital automated system using Go Paperless Custom Apps & Forms. A scalable and customised solution for large and small businesses, Go Paperless is a custom built web based platform suitable for customer orders, job management, asset management, scheduling, time sheets, invoicing, WHA/JSA forms and accounting integration. The fact that it was fully customisable or built for us and in the right cost bracket made it easy, said Luke. Luke said they were also happy with the support offered by Colourworks during the implementation phase of the project. They were good. They came up and spent considerable time understanding our business and the order process. Then there was probably a month, or two months I suppose, of little tweaks. When we were using it we d run into something that we wanted tweaked or updated, and they handled it every time. The Results Sweetmans Timber says their adoption of Go Paperless Custom Apps & Forms has resulted in better customer service and greater efficiency and automation in the customer ordering process. The speed is much faster in all areas in dealing with customers, said Luke, who cites live updates on orders automatically sent to customers as a game changer for his business. Now we can open an order and say, Look, it s not ready but it s only missing two or three pieces. It should only take us another couple of hours to get it. Or, They haven t started it but it should be picked and dispatched before midday. We ve got that visibility to know where it s at in the process, whereas before we only ever knew it was either ready or it s not. The automated system has also improved internal production efficiencies, with staff able to work on the same order simultaneously. After we d been using it for a while, the guys asked if we could add an intelligent search function, so they could look a product up across all orders. So if something comes out of the mill and they re not 100% sure where it belongs, the system will give them the orders that it belongs to. Automated job completion notifications have also enabled faster delivery. In the past, something might have been ready at ten o clock today but we won t know about it until four o clock and we ll ring them tomorrow. In that instance that order could have actually gone, so it s sped up the dispatch process as well, Luke said.

4 Online filing of customer orders has also proved beneficial. The other advantage now is that we ve got a digital attachment of the original customer s order request, Luke said. So if we ve keyed it wrong or if they want to clarify some detail, before they d have to come to the office and we d dig the paperwork out and look at it. Whereas now they ve got that on their tablet in the mill - they can just open the order then and there. Future Plans Sweetmans Timber has also rolled out Autofile which intelligently captures, indexes and digitally archives all creditor invoices, and has implemented a Colourworks Australia managed print service which integrates their printers, copiers and scanners seamlessly with these applications, under one management plan. The next goal is to automate the second part of their sales order process where staff manually transfer sales orders from tablet computers onto a job whiteboard. At the moment they still replicate their orders on the tablets to a whiteboard for the mill production guys so that they know what to cut, Luke said. So we re getting errors from people writing the wrong stuff down. Currently we re just developing another section so that we ll have a screen up there that will link through, and remove this manual step. With Go Paperless Custom Apps and Forms, we ve got an efficient automated customer order process far beyond what we would have thought possible. - Luke Crump, General Manager Sweetmans Timber

5 Learn more Contact Colourworks to learn more about our Go Paperless Custom Apps & Forms that can automate your business processes P PERLESS