Success Stories
All Earth Group
Interview with:
| Heidi Dauth
,
Director of Administration and Finance |
Company Name:
| All Earth Group |
Business Type:
| Logistics, Project Management, Resource Recovery |
Fleet Size:
| 80 |
Operational Area:
| Western Australia |
Challenge
"As an enterprise owner, your competitive advantage is in
your business model and in today's environment you must embrace
technology to leverage that advantage. But you can't rely on
software to create ideas or your differentiators. We needed an IT
partner to meet our business, not make us fit them."
Solution
TransLogix's integrated Sapphire Transport Management
Software suite to deliver "one version of the truth" across its
diverse business units.
Benefits
- Help drive efficiencies and customer
satisfaction
- Capture and measure the cost of jobs, and loads and
provide real time visibility of operational
profitability.
- Training and ease of use enables multi-skilling and
mobilising of staff across the business units
Background
Operating a waste transfer station in Perth's eastern
suburbs, All Earth Group receives and recycles inert and green
waste into quality construction, civil and landscaping products.
All Earth recycles more than 70 percent of that waste. The Group
also boasts a fleet of 80 plant and bulk haulage vehicles and
offers plant hire, bulk haulage, screening and crushing, and fully
contracted site works services including site clean-up and waste
disposal, onsite recycling, bulk earthworks, underground services
and subdivisional development requirements. On top of that, All
Earth's Garden Centre provides a full range of garden and
landscaping materials, including its range of recycled
products.
The Challenge
This diverse business, with its complex operational and
administrative coordination requirements, has grown "from the
kitchen table" to reach a turnover of $24 million in just ten
years.
Heidi Dauth, Director of Administration and Finance at the
All Earth Group, said: "Our set of spreadsheets and basic
accounting package had worked very well for us but we'd outgrown
them. It was time to replace many with one automated and fully
integrated system. We needed to know we had integrity in the data
we were relying on, we needed better reporting and to reduce
revenue leakage."
The Group identified that maintenance of the old system,
which relied on two key individuals, could be easily jeopardised
and opened the business to a high degree of risk: "If we'd 'eaten
the same salmon' we would have been in deep trouble," Dauth
said.
Solution & Benefits
The All Earth Group developed a brief for an integrated
solution that would offer flexibility and capture all information
in one system to provide critical data integrity, searchability and
customer relationship management.
Having assessed all available offerings from more than
half a dozen providers, in detail, Dauth said the TransLogix
Sapphire suite was selected as: "It was the only one that could do
what we needed across ERP, transport, accounts and personnel. We
had considered building our own system but the risks were too great
and TransLogix offered us the security of a well proven product.
Because we don't do simple A-to-B transporting, Sapphire was the
only solution that met the quirks of each business unit and brought
them together for our accounting purposes."
The new system includes Sapphire's Transport, Accounts,
Payroll, Asset Ledger, and Workshop modules, which allows
visibility across the whole business and will help drive
efficiencies and customer satisfaction. The solution enables All
Earth Group to capture and measure the cost of jobs, and loads and
provide real time visibility of operational
profitability.
Dauth said: "We rely on our own 80 drivers plus 50-100
sub-contractors to bring us the 2,000 pieces of paper each month to
do our invoicing. We knew we must have had leakage but couldn't
quantify it. Now, each sale has a unique identifier so we know what
pieces of paper are missing and can chase them."
Further automation and a move to paperless operations may
be undertaken in the future using TransLogix's Mobility
technologies in All Earth's own trucks in its newly acquired skip
bin business.
"We often have clients using different service types
within our business and we can now see the complete picture from
one view. And, importantly, our sales team now has a whole of
business and whole of customer understanding," Dauth
said.
Another serious consideration in the selection of new
software was how employees would embrace the automation and the new
processes. But Dauth explained that because TransLogix could make
it look familiar, like renaming data fields to existing language,
there has been little resistance: "There is now a consistent look
and feel across the business. There is one lot of information which
presents differently for each business unit. I can see down the
track we'll be able to benefit from multi-skilling and mobilising
staff across the business units because training and system use is
so much easier," Dauth said.
The development of a weighbridge interface by TransLogix
for the All Earth Group was, according to Dauth, a great example of
the confidence and professionalism which TransLogix brought to the
table. Most weighbridge systems are standalone with some feeding
into accounting packages. "We needed a more complex interface to
overcome the problems of time expended and the data integrity in
our manual export-manipulate-import system," Dauth said.
The interface now captures the arrival of a truck at the
weighbridge; records its registration, type of load and weight;
accesses the customer information, calculates the cost from the
contract and prints a ticket.
Making the right decision
Anselm Waterfield, CEO TransLogix says: "All Earth Group
is an excellent example of what can be achieved "out of the box"
from the deep functionality and high degree of flexibility
available from Sapphire. Now the core modules are bedded down
providing one version of the truth across the business, we look
forward to deploying more "smarts" to drive further efficiencies
and help All Earth build their competitive advantage".
"TransLogix is tying it all together for us and the
savings are starting to flow," Dauth said.
http://www.allearth.com.au/
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