The Masterpet story

In 1954, a Polish man named Grenoski came to New Zealand with a dream to start his own pet business. He shortened Grenoski to Green, and 'R Green Ltd.' was born, selling over 100 products for pets. In 1961, new owners took over renaming R Green Ltd. to Masterpet and by the late 80s, Masterpet products were launched into Kiwi supermarkets. Today, 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. 

The Problem

Since we began working with Masterpet in 2014, they have been steadily winning new business, requiring us to quickly set up the EDI so they can start trading. We had a chat with System Administrator Richard Philp who tells us about the move to EDI with Crossfire.

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. 

The 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. 

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.