Central Safety & Workwear, one of Australia's fastest growing providers of quality safety products and services, chooses HansaWorld software for better reporting, improved customer service and increased efficiency.
Company profile
Central Safety and Workwear offer services including embroidery, screen printing and transfers, fittings on-site and a wide range of promotional products. Over the years, the company has increased products and services to become a one stop shop for their customers across Australia. They manufacture products to suit each company’s personal requirements and the team can source all safety products at a competitive price. By also offering clients access to the latest promotional products, Central Safety can help promote their businesses.
Before Hansaworld
Central Safety recognised a growing need for a new system that could provide better reporting, particularly for their large corporate customers who required more information from them to continue to do business. Many of these customers had demands to collate and provide more individual detail about uniforms.
Another important element they were looking to improve was to keep records of previously purchased products to reduce duplication of orders from customers. Jill Blackett, director at Central Safety, explains:
"We were looking to achieve time-savings in creating quotations and orders relating to repetitive business, and from emailing and faxing quotations and invoices directly from the system instead of manually printing them out and faxing them."
Choosing HansaWorld
Aside from direct emailing and faxing, it was also regarded as important to be able to have negative stock in the system. "This is important", Jill explains, "because in the real world our business needs it. We were also looking for a system that could grow with our business in terms of future, additional locations, and also sophisticated stock control which we didn't have in our existing systems".
A number of options were evaluated and the result was that HansaWorld was able to address these requirements and offer a lot more functionality that Central Safety had yet considered, such as better analysis in reporting.
mplementation and Solution
Central Safety implemented HansaWorld during a quiet period between April and May 2007. They are running 5 users with accounts, logistics, CRM, Quotations, Purchase Orders and Wide Area Networking.
Benefits and results
- Better information for customers and suppliers on documents
- Improved management of complex customer price lists
- Time savings with financial reporting, including tax reporting (particularly Business Activity Statements)
- Accurate data entry through style, colour, size matrix
- All customer history on a single screen through integrated ERP CRM software
Jill explains "In our previous system we could create sales orders and purchase orders but we couldn't really get much information back out of the system. We were looking for broader information and at the same time in more detail".
HansaWorld also provided considerable improvements in the layouts and use of documents. "We had great feedback from our customers that they prefer the HansaWorld layout of their invoices. Also Purchase Orders created in HansaWorld now provide much more flexibility by allowing staff to add key comments which are required by the many suppliers to Central Safety" Jill adds.
Price lists in the safety industry can be complex, and the key is to manage these more efficiently. "Price lists and differential pricing is important to us. Some customers want a specific price and previously price lists used to be in a separate system which we had to look up separately. Now we can assign these to our customers so that they automatically calculate on the order as we create it. Jill says; "Product specials are being used and they are set to apply for specified periods without needing to supervise staff in the sales process, freeing up more of our time."
In CRM, the status reports are very quick and easy to operate, making it much easier to find information. Customers, supplier and stock history can be instantly viewed on a single screen that shows the entire story without entering other parts of the system.
"BAS reporting in HansaWorld was so easy, the ability to press a button and you have the results immediately. I have not worked with a system before that was this easy and did not need an accountant to set up the BAS reports. "
 |
"By taking advantage of the features offered in HansaWorld, we should be able to work more efficiently as a company without having to hire more people, at the same time as getting more information out of the accounting than we could in the past. It was vital for us to reduce data entry by removing rekeying, while getting more out of the system with less effort.
| |
Future
In the future, Central Safety will open another site in Brisbane, they will then start to use expand their use of objects for better analysis. CRM module is one thing they are planning to use more in the future, for example, the report "Who has bought/Not bought" for items is a good way to identify sales opportunities and create targeted campaigns.
Central Safety plans to send newsletters, to communicate with their customers for new product lines and promotions.
Jill Blackett says:
"The integrated e-mail will provide us with the ability to mail shot brochures and newsletters to customers and prospects. We like the paperclip feature because this allows us to attach internal documents and files to records for easy access by all staff. In the future we would like to consider the HansaWorld Webshop as an area for increasing our sales".
To read the entire case study, you can download it here
