Streamline Your Logistics with Xero and CartonCloud

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.

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.