Automated Billing

Wanted to move to an area which kids could run around, be free and was a safe place for your family to grow. Hotham Freight is a business based in Bright in the Alpine Shire, and we're a link between Bright and the ski fields delivering food, beverages, linen, and the list goes on.

When we purchased the business two years ago, the goal was to create a business which was easier to manage. When we first looked at the business administration-wise, it was heavily paper-based.

The way that it used to be tracked on how to invoice was you bring it in, each customer would have their own profile sheet for invoicing, then it would also have to be written onto a hand delivery PRD. It was just hugely administration heavy.

With my background in project management, I’d seen that there's easier ways of doing it by just bringing in technology. That's when I started to look for a solution.

I came across a video from CartonCloud which was this guy was out of control busy with all his paper load. He brought in CartonCloud and then all that madness went away. He was organized and then he was able to sleep in and have a bit of a life. 

Once I talked to Vincent and his team, the support was here in Australia, they were easy to contact. It was just an easy decision for us.

We're in a position now where we're able to look at different freight routes now. We're into Melbourne,we're into other ski fields, Falls Creek, and we're expanding from Bright where previously we were quite restricted.

So with the program itself, it talks to your accounting software so your accountant's happy. It tracks your freight. You can allocate freights til you make efficient decisions rather than making best judgement calls.

Back to that cartoon when I first looked at the program and knew in the background that CartonCloud was doing all these invoicing for him, that comes through every Monday morning. I wake up, I know what I'm doing. I know the costings are captured and I know it's correct.

When I started Emmjay, my goal was to grow the business, grow it to a point where I could sell it and retire at 50. 

When we were running the inventory through Microsoft Excel we had no history, we had no data, everything was manual.  It was okay when the business was small, but as it grew it just became too time-consuming.

I did a lot of research to the providers of WMS software and some of them were talking hundreds of thousands of dollars - which, for a small business, it’s just not viable to spend that kind of money.

My experience with CartonCloud is it's a very affordable solution for small business owners. The benefit of CartonCloud is as the transport system that works with the warehouse system. 

It cuts down some of the communication between the warehouse manager and the customers, because in the past if they wanted to know something they would ring or email the warehouse manager. Now they're able to log on CartonCloud and see if a purchase order has been entered and finalized or if a sales order has been dispatched.

So it also gives them more visibility as well, and they can run their own stock reports, so they have visibility of their stock. They're not ringing the warehouse asking if this is in stock - they can just log on and find out information themselves.

With the development of CartonCloud and their internal development, we're able to run more and more reports and have more data out, and then be more transparent to the warehouse staff that can help improve their performance as well.

And the value of CartonCloud is they’re continually working with updates and improving their software all the time.

We have 28 staff, so we have 28 families and that's my biggest thing is the family drive. For me, that's huge.

We had $4,500 in the bank. I was on maternity leave. We had two other children as well, and a colleague who we'd known for years, he had an accident and couldn't drive.

His family approached us to take over his company. We realized that there was obviously a

hole in the market, so we started Dunedin, and then by customer demand they asked us to go to Christchurch and it was right around the earthquake time. So it was really quite hard. And then 2017 we opened up in Auckland. 

I'm quite a relationship person and a lot of the systems I came across were American based that's too far away.

CartonCloud was Australian, but it was owned by some Kiwis, which I thought was kind of cool when I spoke to them. The response time was really good. I inquired and Rob got back to me. We had a lot of laughs on the phone and that's what I like. That's how a good relationship should be. 

The main benefits for us is stock management, because we hold a lot of importers products and they're based overseas, it's making sure that we know when the stock's come in, what's happened to it, when it's gone back out if any returns are there so they know which product is faulty and which isn't.

The importing of the products is so easy. It's just boom and that's in there, like within seconds.

We had two warehouses and I needed to go live in our Christchurch one and I did that all by myself without any help. That's just how easy it was.

The link between CartonCloud and iCOS Live was really important so that we didn't have to do data entry twice. We wanted to be able to put it into CartonCloud and then the jobs pushed through to iCOS so that the operational staff could allocate to trucks and send them

Out. They work so well together. They just got on with it and got it right for us. It's just great. 

I'm really proud when I see my trucks driving down the road knowing that started this from nothing. All of our people are all important and I just want to keep building on that and bring more customers on board that have those same values and just do our best to keep everybody happy really.

Angelo Iannace:
I've earned a bit of a reputation as a loose canon; that's what some people think, eh.

What the fuck is that Jimmy? Well why did I have to walk in and find it?
[foreign]

That's a fucking muzzle.

Others may say it is passion. All it is is we get a little bit emotional when change comes upon, eh?

At [inaudible 00:00:33] we had three girls and all they would do is enter every single invoice. Every single bit of paperwork. So you're hoping that you were capturing everything. We'd actually physically count how many boxes we'd moved for the day. We had a client that we were losing on average maybe a box a day. Between five and eight boxes a week I was giving him as a credit.

I would never forget, I got put onto CartonCloud by recommendation.

Vince Fletcher:
We sort of did several attempts at kicking the thing off here but each time we ran into different issues. When it ended up all sort of coming to a tee was that I'd booked in a week to come down here. And the moment I came into the office, Ange said,
"I'm sorry Vincent. I didn't know that you were coming down. I sort of forgot."

Angelo Iannace:
We eventually pulled the pin on CartonCloud. And then I said to Vincent, "We're canning the idea. Don't worry about it gents, I'm not taking it." "Not gonna work, shut it down, we're shutting it all down. We don't want it. Tell Vincent he can shove it up his ass.

Jess:

Yeah it was a pretty dramatic scene.

Vince Fletcher:

I said to Angelo, "All right, I understand. Do you mind though if I just spend the rest of today kind of like exit interviewing some of your staff just to find out where everything went wrong?"

Angelo Iannace:

Every single day, listening to every single problem, going through every ... like the phone would ring, right? It could have been my wife seeing what I wanted for lunch and Vincent would be there like. It showed me that he had belief in the system. But it was that sort of involvement, that sort of listening to solve a problem which is what got him over the line.

Vince Fletcher:

On about the third day I sort of was like, "Got to talk to Angelo about this. I think this can be repaired." And so I was really nervous and I came in here actually, I came into this office and said, "Angelo, I need to talk to you." And he straight away yelled out something in Italian to Jess.

Angelo Iannace:

Jess, Vieni Qui. I screamed to Jess, porta [foreign], which is bring the glasses.

Vince Fletcher:

He came wandering in with these two shot glasses.

Angelo Iannace:

Half way through when you're trying to sell me something, if I pull out the glasses, this deal is done.

Jess:

Then we just had a [inaudible 00:02:36] and that's it.
Angelo Iannace:

When CartonCloud came along and all of a sudden doing the [inaudible 00:02:43] for us and it's so simple. It's just a matter of entering the number and when it's actually giving me a count, I'm going, "Wow, he's unbelievable." Now [inaudible 00:02:53] I don't lose a box because everything
is [inaudible 00:02:57]. And CartonCloud was so easy. It's just like night and day. It's unbelievable. It is what it is at the end of the day. It's a good way of controlling the stock. It's a good way of knowing where your product's been, where it's gone to, how
it's got there. Fantastic. If you're in transport, this [inaudible 00:03:13] is a no-brainer.

Tom Coyler: I'm proud to be a South Australian, and I wanna share what's good about South Australia with the rest of the world.

I have a dream that we of APF Cold Storage, that one day we'll be a premium supplier of refrigerator services to South Australian producers.

That being anyone that is producing within South Australia, and needs to get it to anywhere around Australia, or exported out of Australia into foreign countries, that we'll be their supplier of choice to provide them those services.

Five to ten years ago, the business was very much one distribution center with a couple of people.

Because everything was paper-based, invoices had to be written manually.

The amount of time spent just simply equating for those charges was unbelievable.
It wasn't even generating a profit at those levels.

We needed automation to make the business sustainable.

When we first started looking for automation as to how to benefit the business, they were talking to over $100,000 to simply get our warehouse system established.

For a small business, we just simply can't afford that.

We had a friendly recommendation that simply said, "What about the guys as CartonCloud?"

Within probably a couple of hours, we had called up, got an appointment to chat to them, and we had a demo of the software, and I was simply blown away.

Our customers are able to log-in, and see exactly what they have.

And as a cold store, we operate much like a bank.

Customers like that security and stock integrity 24/7.

We've managed to streamline our logistics so that when we're doing deliveries, and we get proof of deliveries signed, they instantly get emailed to the customer, which gives them the confidence knowing that it's been delivered on-time and on-temp when they want it to be.

We have customers that suddenly started doing hundreds of cartons pick-per-week.
The customer simply emails the spreadsheet of what needs to be picked, and it's automatically sent through to CartonCloud, which enables our members to use their iPad's to pick the orders effectively using technology and no paperwork.

The automation of CartonCloud is great because we're able to focus now more on how we're growing the business, rather than the ongoings of the business itself.

We have a real desire to give the customer everything they want, and CartonCloud's doing great work to constantly be ahead of the curve when developing software, that I know moving forward, they'll keep up with me, and what my customer needs are.

We started out with a dream of just providing transport to small craft breweries. There was no provider in our industry for the smaller, little guy. It was only, you know, I only wanna see you if you've got 50 pallet loads and a million consignments a week. I think, for us, we just wanna become the best in the industry.

So, before we had CartonCloud, I was doing everything manually. All day long, it was all night long. It was on the weekends. I couldn't go out for dinner. I couldn't go out with friends. I couldn't watch TV because I would be sitting at the desk, filing things, routing things. I literally worked one night til 1:00 a.m. doing it. I just said, "I can't keep doing this." I said, "We have to find a solution." One of our customers said to me, "Oh, you should check out CartonCloud. "We use it for S.A. "It's a really good program."

So then we got on board with using it. And it's just been a really amazing journey. I would say absolutely no doubt CartonCloud is the absolute best system. Being able to finish like a normal person at 5:00. We've done all the allocating. We've printed all the paperwork for the next day. It's just, you can't really put a price on it. Until you lose that part of your life, and then suddenly get it back, you really don't appreciate just being able to go out for dinner and not have to think, I have to go home because I have to go home and do all the allocating and filing of paperwork.

It saves on costs. It saves on having to employ more staff. Because if I didn't have this program, I would have to have probably two admin people with me because there's no way that I'd be able to do the volume of work that we do with the program. It also really would prevent our business from being able to grow. Like, Andy would ring in a sale, or the customer might wanna join us and I'd say, "No, I can't, please I can't take any more work." Whereas now, I'm like, "Sure!" I don't even notice.

The kids, they're much happier because I'm much more present so it's really really changed our lives. It's made us much happier. My husband comes home and everyone's finished work for the day. It's given us the ability to get as big as we possibly can. For me, it's a no-brainer.