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Every day the Sydney warehouse needs to prepare and dispatch multiple line haul deliveries to a network of Distribution Centres across Australia as well as delivering all local orders directly to their clients.
This complex mixture of line haul and local deliveries, local and country rates and multiple carriers presents a major challenge for National Operations Manager Darren Reemeyer to be able to offer high customer service levels at affordable costs.
“We currently use a total of 14 carriers with three specialising in line haul. The line haul carriers make 15 interstate deliveries a week with local carriers responsible for thousands of local deliveries from 8 interstate Distribution Centres and numerous depots.
Before Moveitnet we used to pick all of our interstate orders as a single batch and handwrite the consignment notes. When the individual orders were repicked at interstate depots carton labels were also handwritten with marker pens for each carton. Labour costs were high and mistakes in quantity or delivery details were common. Tracking late or missing consignments was a nightmare and it was impossible to quickly and accurately produce end of month freight accruals and do freight invoice reconciliation,” said Mr Reemeyer.
In 2007 Mr Reemeyer decided to grasp the nettle and update all of their distribution and despatch processes in a single stroke by installing the Moveitnet on-line outbound Freight Management System.
Step one—getting the basics
“When we first started using Moveitnet we only used the basic despatch functions for the first six months but even they improved the speed and accuracy of despatch from day one,” said Mr Reemeyer.
“Their system looks and works the same for all consignments but it produces documentation both in hard and soft copy to suit the quite different needs of all of our carriers” he said.
“Our first improvements were in the reduction of labour costs to produce proper, more accurate consignment documentation and carton labels for less than pallet lot shipments. However, over time I pushed our team to work on using more of the Moveitnet functionality. We kept working on new ideas and we soon found other good savings,”
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