Warehouse Management System for SME's

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're a 3PL warehousing business our core sectors of food customers.

We do dry goods for supermarkets and other businesses.

We do consumer electronics, we also do quite a bit in the cosmetic sector.

So we specialize in probably 3 to 4 main sectors.

We set out at the start that we want to become a proper 3PL operation.

That was our overall objective.

We started with a fairly well known 3PL software which was US based.

It was generic, it wasn't especially what we wanted.

We also found that dealing with a software vendor not on our normal operating hours wasn't ideal, so the customer service angle wasn't great for us.

At the same time our business was evolving.

So suddenly we had 40 clients and we had supermarkets.

We were basically picking, packing 16 hours a day.

We needed 100% picking accuracy or as close to as we could get it.

So we needed modern technology, modern software for our warehouse staff to use.

So we spent a lot of time looking for products.

And we came across CartonCloud, and it was absolutely the solution in terms of technology and usability for our people in our warehouse that we were looking for.

We used to have people manually inputing sales orders, manually inputing purchase orders and not really being able to keep up.

To be able to have automation, integration with sales orders, electronically, purchase orders, efficiency in picking, we've turned an unprofitable operation into a profitable one.

And we probably had a reduction of four full time equipment in terms of head count.

It's reduced our overhead by as much as 20%, and massively improved our accuracy.

It's been a massive win for us.

What CartonCloud has enabled us to take a business that was losing money and actually turned it into a business that's making money, and is self sufficient, and relatively easy to run.

And we did it and we didn't miss a beat in doing it.