Case Study: Distribution and Warehousing 

"Not only am I paying way less than I was before, I’m getting more productivity out of my team because now it’s all about pushing half a dozen buttons – and it’s all done."

 

 

Background

 

In 1975, RISE Distributors opened its first office in Perth. Today, the wholesaler is one of Australia’s leading industrial paint distributors, with offices and warehouses across 10 different locations. In August 2019, RISE’s new operators implemented MYOB Advanced to help them connect the business, giving them complete control, empowering their workers, unlocking real-time insights, and helping the company deliver better client experiences.

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Incumbent system too big and complex

 

When RISE’s new operators acquired the business in 2019, one of the first things they noticed was that the accounting and management system was “too big and complex for the size and nature of the business,” Chief Financial Officer Paul Benetti explains.

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This resulted in several inefficiencies. First, the cost of maintaining the incumbent system was exorbitant. Second, the company didn’t have the capability to extract useable data.

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“The system was complete overkill. We employ 50 people, and the old system required three or four dedicated team members to manage it.

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“One of the first things we did when we came in was to look at how we could reduce the cost and how we could make the system more user-friendly,” says Paul.

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In addition to the cost, the old system had functional limitations. It required third-party add-ons for point-of-sale and was difficult to extract useable data from.

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This lack of connection didn’t just disempower staff, it also meant the company wasn’t getting the real-time insights it needed – or delivering customer experiences that matter.

 

"The system was complete overkill – too big and complex for the size and nature of the business."

 

How MYOB Advanced helped RISE become a connected business

Cloud-based, user-friendly, integrated solution

 

After reviewing a few different options, it was MYOB Advanced that had what RISE needed to become a connected business.

As a cloud-based system, it can be used by anyone with a login and device with a browser and internet connection from anywhere in the country. RISE’s mobile sales team can now deliver better customer experiences, including placing orders and checking delivery timings while on the road.

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MYOB Advanced provides a single, integrated solution that doesn’t require additional add-ons for point-of-sale.

“Our previous system didn’t have a POS system attached to it, and even though we don’t do a lot of retail sales, we still do some. Previously, a completely different system was required and the two didn’t speak to each other – so that was causing issues,” Paul explains.

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Lastly: “You don’t need to be Einstein to get to the data,” Paul says about user-friendly MYOB Advanced. “If someone wants to look at something and drill down to analyse it, it’s as simple as clicking on the item.”

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“MYOB Advanced costs a third of what I was paying for the old system – every month was costing me an arm and a leg – so we pushed them hard,” Paul adds.

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“Everybody who has been involved with the implementation ensured the least amount of ‘noise’ was generated for both our staff and customers. That’s a big measure of success for us.”

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With better connections between systems, RISE could empower staff, get access to the real-time insights it needed to take control of finances and deliver customer experiences that matter.

 

"Not only am I paying way less than I was before, I’m getting more productivity out of my team because now it’s all about pushing half a dozen buttons – and it’s all done."

 

 

More for less

 

With approximately 3500 customers and 19,000 stock items, Paul explains that the company can easily produce 200 invoices per day, ranging in value from $20 to $20,000. On top of that, the pricing can be different for every customer, so it was essential the new system could handle complex pricing data.

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“If you were to develop a matrix of products down one side and potential customer discounts down the other, we’ve got millions of potential price items,” Paul says.

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After a slightly slower start, and a few tweaks from RISE’s implementation partner, MYOB Advanced manages the company’s pricing data with ease – resulting in huge cost-savings and an increase in productivity.

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 “Not only am I paying way less than I was before, I’m getting more productivity out of my team because now it’s all about pushing half a dozen buttons – and it’s all done.”

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Customised dashboards for each of the company’s branches gives branch managers easy and immediate access to real-time insights related directly to their branch.

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POS is now integrated and part of MYOB Advanced, meaning if one branch is having issues, the others aren’t affected and can continue to operate smoothly.

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Lastly, customised reporting connects everyone in the business with the real-time insights they need to deliver better customer experiences.

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 “It’s a business benefit. We now account for everything and can produce branch numbers, which the company has never been able to do before,” Paul says.

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Now the system is implemented and operating well, RISE will continue to work with its implementation partner to identify issues specific to the business and create system customisations that allow it to connect the business even more.

 

"People are doing more than they were before because MYOB Advanced is easy to use."

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Arrow Transport 

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“The impact is, people know what is going on as it's happening.”

 

Arrow Transport’s motto is ‘Big enough to get the job done, but small enough to care’ – and it’s this commitment to top-notch service (plus a clever pricing strategy) that has seen the company quickly become a key player in the Australian transport and logistics industry.

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Innovation runs in the veins of family business

 

Founded in Melbourne in 2011, Arrow Transport is a family-owned and operated business with over 250 employees across Victoria, NSW and Queensland. The goal is simple: deliver customer product on time, safely and securely – no matter how big the company or how small the job.

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Managing director Craig Webster has been at the helm of the business since it started, and his father Steve Webster does a lot of design work for the company. You only have to look at the company’s fleet to recognise that the Websters, along with the rest of the Arrow Transport team, enjoy pushing the boundaries, and are leading the way with innovative technologies right across their industry.

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Arrow Transport was the first transport company in Melbourne to introduce Super B combinations and A Doubles to rural areas, making the movement of containers easier and more efficient. They’ve also designed a combination rigid vehicle for customers with specific site limitations, as well as ten customised and multi-use 40-foot skels – which allow them to maximise fleet utilisation and versatility, and therefore service more customers.

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Systems lacked power for growing business

 

Group financial controller Adam McLoughlin has seen first-hand the rapid growth of Arrow Transport over the past ten years. When he originally joined the team, the company was only Melbourne-based, and turnover was close to $20 million annually.

Today, they have a site in Sydney and Brisbane, and two sites in Melbourne – one of which includes a dairy-accredited facility. This year it’s looking like the company will hit $65 million turnover.

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Like many rapidly growing businesses, Arrow Transport quickly realised its systems weren’t capable of handling an increase in transactional data. It’s at this point that Adam re-joined the team and was charged with implementing a new system that better matched their customer service and business goals.

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Old system had limited reporting functionality

Running basic reports would often crash system

 

The company had been using Xero since the early days, and even though the system had served them well, it was beginning to slow the team down. It was taking far too long to run certain reports because of a significant increase in transactional data – sometimes even causing the whole system to crash.

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“We were constantly chasing our tail and limited to month-end reporting. It would take us two weeks to finish and by that time, we were already two weeks into the following month – and the learnings weren’t relevant anymore,” Adam explains.

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The business also required more sophisticated capabilities including comprehensive divisional reporting and budgeting.

 

Customised system will move with transport company

MYOB Advanced great value for money

 

Adam was the one to suggest an ERP system but admits he wasn’t familiar with MYOB Advanced. His biggest concern was making sure they found a system that would grow with the company – eliminating the need to move to a different system further down the track.

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“We’d already used an out-of-the-box system and it didn’t have the right functionality for the size of our business, so we knew we needed a system that could be customised – especially for reporting.

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New system puts company on front foot

Streamlined reporting improves performance assessment

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For Adam, it’s the simple changes that have yielded the greatest improvements. Being able to customise and run whatever reports he needs – and in real-time – means the business can assess performance at a granular level.

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“From day one, the new system ran budget-versus-actuals for all our divisions. That may not seem ground-breaking to some, but it’s visibility that the company had never had before,” he says.

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They’ve been able to streamline reporting processes, thereby reducing manual workarounds and removing any downtime that was a result of a crashed system. Monthly reporting has moved to weekly, and as Adam explains, “The impact is, people know what is going on as it's happening.”

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While the team will always have “bread and butter tasks”, they can do the work efficiently and with accuracy.

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“It just means we’re not spending time worrying about whether the report is correct, having to double or triple-check whether the report is compiled in the right way. There much less room for error,” Adam says.

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Velixo integration a game-changer

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After 12 months of getting used to the system, Adam says they decided to integrate Velixo.

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“That has been a fundamental change to our reporting because we now spend no time compiling reports – we run the report, review and add any commentary that is required.”

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With less manual work involved in running financial reports, Adam has more time for high-level tasks and managing his team, and that means improvements to other business processes too.

 

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Summary

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The story of Arrow Transport

• Founded in Melbourne in 2011, Arrow Transport is a family-owned and operated Australian business with over 300 employees across three states.

• An innovative leader in the transport and logistics sector, it provides services to the import, export and freight-forwarding industries, including transport, warehousing and distribution, logistics and CFS (container freight station) and quarantine wash and fumigation.

• With sites in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, the company is likely to hit $65 million turnover in 2020.

 

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Real-time customised reporting with MYOB Advanced

• Increased reporting capabilities give the company better visibility of business performance

• Velixo integration provides custom, real-time reporting within minutes

• System gives staff tools to run comprehensive financial reports, reducing manual workarounds and improving worker productivity

• Increased efficiency and accuracy allow managers to focus on higher-level tasks

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Yahava KoffeeWorks

 

"For me, it’s freed up my time so I can get out and see customers and create more business."

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Background 

 

Finding the perfect cup of coffee is a labour of love for the team at Yahava. It all started when Alex Kok (fondly known as the Koffee Baron) and his wife Mandy, opened a quaint coffee roastery retail store in a small Margaret River vineyard (The Grove), South Western Australia.

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The shop served coffee using beans they roasted on-site, with tastings running twice a day. That quickly moved to more intimate and frequent tasting experiences as people came through the store – and before long, they began fulfilling small wholesale orders for cafes, wineries and breweries in the local area.

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Fast-forward 20 years and Yahava is like a triple-shot espresso – strong and all about the coffee. They have an online store, a wholesale distribution network, Kwik Koffee drive-thrus and kiosks for those on the run, and, for a full immersion into the world of coffee, tastings, barista courses and a Kafé at Yahava KoffeeWorks stores.

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An adventure in every cup

 

Yahava will travel almost anywhere in the world to find the best Arabica Coffee beans – even remote and often difficult-to-access plantations. When they find the right beans, they bring them home, roast them and distribute them to their wholesale customers and retail franchises.

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Their aim: to make every cup transport you to a different corner of the world. It’s this drive to match people with the perfect brew – and maybe the constant intoxicating aroma of roasting beans – that has helped the company take the coffee world by storm.

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While they’re happy to traipse the more rugged path for the best coffee, behind the scenes should be a different story, says co-director and owner: Rob Kinninmont. The old systems were struggling to keep up, and with each franchise using a different system, the business was a little disconnected.

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“For new franchises, they’d need to learn four or five different systems to look at sales and reporting. The idea of a franchise is that you all use the same equipment and technology – we needed to move more towards that,” Rob says.

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Too much data taking up too much time

Double and triple-handling of data slowing down business

 

As the years ticked by, and the business got bigger, Yahava’s old systems started causing problems. Despite having most of the functionality they required, data processing times were slow, forcing the team to spend hours on simple administration tasks.

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“One of our biggest problems was how long it was taking us to process daily and weekly invoices for sales orders. Some orders we get are 20-30 items, and it would take us forever to manually enter everything,” Rob explains.

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The more data they put into the system, the slower it got. The only option was to back-up old data to a hard drive, but that didn’t always improve things, and it made running reports in real-time almost impossible.

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The company also had no way of tracking finished goods across multiple franchise locations.

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“We’d been using the same systems since the business started and we never had any way of improving the speed without removing years of data – and then rebuilding everything,” says Rob.

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MYOB Advanced the right blend for Yahava

More options that suited the coffee company’s growth

 

Frustrated and tired of constantly watching the loading bar, it was time for an upgrade. Your systems should make life easier – not harder, Rob says.

 

At first glance, MYOB Advanced ticked all the right boxes.

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“We stocktake all our products, including our roasted and ground coffee, and the other systems the franchises were looking at didn’t have the option of doing that,” Rob explains.

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It didn’t take them long to realise Advanced could do that – and a whole lot more.

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Less data entry, more time for customers

Improved processing of large data volume

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One of Yahava’s biggest challenges was dealing with an excessive amount of sales and inventory data.

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With nine Kwik Koffee franchises across Western Australia, three Yahava KoffeeWorks stores (one in Singapore), an online store and wholesale clients, Rob’s team would spend most of their working day manually entering this information.

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With their new system, back-up and processing times are “almost non-existent”, and they’ve saved “hours a week just in man-hours”, cutting data-entry time by at least 50%.

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For Rob, this improvement means he can use his staff’s time better.

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“I can lock my staff in at certain times of the day to do their role and know they can do it quite comfortably,” he says.

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Minimised lost sales and inventory oversupply

 

Before rolling out MYOB Advanced, the company was grappling with their manufacturing process and inventory levels across multiple locations.

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Now they have the option of setting par levels, which makes them more efficient at managing their product lines across their stores – and supplying product where the customer demand is.

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“We don’t run out of product nearly as much as we used to – you run out in our business and to get more product in can take a little bit of time,” Rob says.

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They’ve also integrated their online ordering system called Ordermentum, which speeds up order processing times.

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“Now our customers can put in their orders via the app and they upload straight into sales orders – we’ve saved hours a week just in man-hours having to manually enter.

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“From a sales perspective, the fact that MYOB Advanced is linked to Ordermentum has certainly helped with sales, especially growing products people might not usually buy – kind of like online shopping,” Rob adds.

 

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Continual improvements and efficiencies

 

Having got the basics sorted, Rob says they can now turn their attention to using as much of the new system as they can.

That means getting visibility of more detailed sales and accounting reporting, something which used to take hours to process – for the simplest of reports.

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They’re also looking at ways to give their staff more accountability in their jobs, better visibility of their employee information, and taking advantage of the ‘cost of goods sold’ functionality.

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“In coffee, the pricing of products goes up every quarter, so it’s something we want to utilise to keep track of our costs and margins,” Rob says.

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Summary

 

An espresso look at Yahava

• Two decades in the making: first coffee store opened in 2000.

• Now an international brand committed to delivering exceptional coffee experiences nationwide, with franchises across Western Australia

• Sourced from around the world, Yahava procures arabica beans renowned for their intense flavours and exceptional quality.

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Advanced helps company deliver better experiences

• Visibility of manufacturing process and inventory levels across multiple locations

• Streamlined inventory and sales data from all business entities accessible in one system.

• Real-time reporting now being used to drive business performance.

• Integrated and automated sales order process cuts admin time in half.

• Using staff time better to drive business growth and improve customer experiences