Case Studies

The Botany Group

The New Zealand division of the Botany Group has offices in Auckland and Christchurch. Originally called the Dairy Culture Company, it is now partnered with the Botany Group in Australia which is an import and distribution business.

Challenge

Having moved from the Unleashed inventory system to Netsuite, the Botany Group were looking for an EDI partner that could handle integration into the more complex system. They had worked with Sandfield before, who was recommended to them by one of their supermarket clients.

Solution

The Crossfire EDI solution works well with Netsuite, which is a system that’s familiar to Sandfield. It measured up in terms of the responsiveness of the team at Sandfield, as well as being a cost-effective solution that would be delivered within a specific time frame.

Results

Accuracy and time savings are the key benefits the Botany Group has noticed since the second integration. With no need for manual data entry, it has freed up those staff to focus on sales. Human error has been eliminated, and all orders can be picked and packed much faster.

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ACFS Port Logistics

ACFS Port Logistics (ACFS) is the largest privately-owned wharf cartage business in Australia, with 1,200 employees moving 1.2million TEU (Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit) annually. Services cover warehousing, transport and freight logistics companies. With their headquarters in Sydney, ACFS have offices and bases in every port in Australia.

Challenge

They have multiple customers with a range of different challenges. There’s no standard way they interface with each other, and no one language. With customers from multiple countries, the system had to be capable of translations. They needed an EDI solution that was robust enough to handle the complexities of many different interfaces, and the ability to get things done swiftly.

Solution

The Crossfire service had the ability to not only meet the above challenges, but their deep experience with the supply chain industry means they didn’t need to have ACFS intricacies explained to them. They came into ACFS with experience and expertise, and a good understanding of the problems they were facing.

Results

They can interact with multiple systems and languages more flexibly, and progress with each of their customers is now much quicker.

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Monson

Monson is an Australian shipping agency that’s been servicing bulk vessels globally for more than 30 years. In a complex port environment where a ‘one size fits all’ approach is impossible, Monson provides a vital service - one point of personalised contact for shipping operators to get all their specific needs met when vessels call at all key ports in Australia.

Challenge

Monson wanted a new financial software system that would integrate all of its data to enable timely and accurate billing and settlement with vessel operators and free up finance staff to focus more on increasing productivity.

Solution

The Sandfield team configured ‘On Account’ (OA), Sandfield’s own cutting edge finance and management accounting solution to integrate with existing vessel systems and details - meaning there was now only one source of true data to communicate accurately and quickly with all of its partners and customers.

Results

The capabilities of Monson’s new accounting system has meant the value OA provides is more like a customer experience system in the seamless process it enables between staff and customer. The high quality and timeliness of disbursements provide an accurate and transparent billing record for customers, who can be confident that what they owe is consistent and correct.

Masterpet

Masterpet is one of the leading distributors of pet supplies in Australasia. With exclusive distribution rights for Iams and Eukanuba, they also stock brands such as Yours Droolly, Trouble & Trix and VitaPet.

Challenge

As the company grew there became a need to move into EDI. An internal manager who was a programmer at heart wrote some programmes so that customers could email orders through to us, and be converted into a format that our ERP system could use. It worked at the time but as we got busier it became harder and harder. When he left, the in-house programs could not be supported anymore. At times the programs would stop working as they became incompatible with the latest operating systems. Although we did find ways around it, we realised that we had to find a better solution.

Solution

We decided that we wanted to make things more streamlined, so we needed to find something that could take the orders, translate them and then send them out to us in a format that was nice and done quickly. Initially, we started using Crossfire only for our biggest clients whose orders were large and being manually entered. It streamlined our processes really well and we have now integrated many of our other clients, bringing new clients on board.

Results

Crossfire has made all of our lives much easier, including the customer services team as they sometimes had to manually input orders which meant that there was potential to introduce manual errors. Now we don’t have as many of those issues as it is automated through one system. As we started using Crossfire more and more we realised that you do a lot more than the EDI integration. Some of our customers use other companies but Crossfire gives better support.

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Honest Brew

Honest Brew is an online craft beer retailer which has been delivering beers directly to customers across the UK and Europe. They work directly with hundreds of independent craft beer producers and bring beer to their customers fresh from the breweries.

Challenge

When Honest Brew started in 2012, their processes were highly manual, as online orders were re-keyed by the team and sent to their 3PL warehouse via email and stock was manually reconciled every week, which meant business processes weren't as streamlined as they could be. As the demand grew, the business struggled. They knew they had to scale up and somehow automate their processes.

Solution

Crossfire's solution was to integrate Honest Brew's inventory management system, TradeGecko, with their 3PL warehouse's system. The integration meant orders were automatically sent to their 3PL warehouse and there was full visibility of their product stock levels. Crossfire also developed custom logic to ensure best practices were followed in the warehouse.

Results

The user experience for Honest Brew's customers greatly improved due to them receiving auto-generated alerts detailing their order status. The automated processes freed up time for the Honest Brew team so they could ensure that their customers received the highest quality beer products.

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