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read moreWednesday, 02 December 2009 07:06
Leading Australian transport and logistics solutions provider, TransLogix, has announced that its Sapphire Transport Management Suite has been chosen by The Woods Group to streamline operations and consolidate growth. The Woods Group was using multiple operational and accounting software applications and recognised the benefits of managing the different elements of its transport business with one flexible and user-friendly software program.The Woods Group is an Australian, family-owned, diversified grain, seeds and stockfeed agribusiness. Its growing, marketing, milling and transport businesses are run separately but are all linked by common management and strategic goals. Woods Transport operates 25 trucks with a team of employed drivers as well as subcontractors for carting bulk grain and containerised freight. Its three key sites, at Port of Brisbane, Toowoomba and Goondiwindi, operate 24 hours per day.
Andrew Woods, Director of The Woods Group and Managing Director of WoodsTransport, said: “As our business has expanded, particularly over the past 12 months, we saw the need for a system which will allow us to consolidate that growth and pick up new clients through the provision of better service.”
The Woods Group was using multiple operational and accounting software applications and recognised the benefits of managing the different elements of its transport business with one flexible and user-friendly software program.
Woods Transport needed a complete logistics solution to efficiently automate its operations from on-farm pickups into storage, to delivery of finished product to overseas terminals, as well as being able to offer competitive pricing and timely service.
“After considerable analysis of what was available in the market, we selected the Translogix Sapphire Transport Management System (TMS) to streamline our processes. We needed operational fluency and full integration with our accounting requirements,” Woods said.
70 percent of Woods Transport’s current business is with internal Woods Grain customers. “The information produced by the new Sapphire system is now correct and transparent across the whole farming and packing operations through to what is visible to the grain trading business,” he said.
The business now has greatly improved productivity, accuracy and speed with the real-time system. Woods explained: “When we prepare vehicle operational instructions, we now enter all the details only once and they can be followed through from truck allocation to invoicing and the generation of a subcontractor’s pay. Under our old multiple programs we’d have to do the same entry up to three times.
“The time saved equals the equivalent of one administrative job – that’s $60,000 we saved straight off the bat,” he said.
Typical of the extremely complex operations of Australia’s SME logistics companies, Woods Transport runs Higher Mass Limit A, B Triple Road Trains under IAP into their Toowoomba hub where they change to B-Doubles or Single Trailers into the wharf.
Woods Transport will be using TransLogix Container Validation, 1-Stop Interface to provide visibility across the business of container arrivals, delays and releases to improve customer service and reduce costs.
Each container can now be tracked against a single release number from when it leaves the container park and produce one accurate invoice per release number.
Anselm Waterfield, CEO of TransLogix, said: “We are delighted to have the Woods Group onboard - they’re a great example of the current shift in the Australian logistics industry. They have recognised the need to be able to compete on more than just price and that using the latest technology is the best way to improve their customer service offerings and their productivity. The TransLogix software solution will provide the platform to secure this strategy and grow their business.”
As Woods Transport can now better track and utilise its existing equipment and capture all costs for all invoices and understand the real cost of moving containers, Woods can now “maintain a decent rate for our work”.
Andrew Woods made a strategic choice to commit to hands-on training from the TransLogix people who use the system all the time and know how to apply it to Woods Transport’s real world operational conditions. “Rather than us clumsily going through the manual ourselves, this training ensured we could be efficiently productive right from the start,” Woods said.
“I have high expectations of Sapphire and am encouraged by the product so far. While our use is in its infancy, we are very happy with how it presents and its ease of use. Importantly for us, the people at TransLogix are very helpful and professional and there is great potential for our relationship.
“We intend to expand our use of Sapphire’s functionality to e-commerce and web viewing to allow our customers to monitor jobs and invoices. This will open up considerable opportunity for marketing by allowing us to offer tangible services differentiators to clients. And we’ll be looking to integrate our GPS tracking into the system and develop Container Validation to ISO 6346,” Woods concluded.
About the Woods Group (www.woodsgroup.com.au)
The Woods Group is an Australian, family-owned, diversified agribusiness that for the past 39 years has operated in the key areas of grain farming, marketing, milling and transport. It is headquartered in Goondiwindi (350 km south-west of Brisbane) in the premium grain growing region of Southern Queensland and Northern NSW. The company has a commitment to and a long term view of the grain industry, and currently has a dedicated and experienced staff of more than 90 people.
About TransLogix (www.translogix.com.au)
TransLogix is Australasia’s leading supplier of transport and logistics solutions with more than 330 customers supported from offices in Auckland, Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane. The Transport Management and 3rd Party Logistics suite includes more than 30 integrated modules covering accounting, transport management, warehouse, workshop, service, optimisation, scheduling, driver fatigue management, web portal, mobility, POD, GPS, mapping, tracking, Business Intelligence, and document imaging.
For further information please contact:
Susan Burt TransLogix +61 2 9467 9400
Andrew Woods Woods Transport +61 7 4671 1935
Shuna Boyd BoydPR +61 2 9418 8100
For more information:
