Shaun Elvines, Warehouse Manager at Glasscorp shares his experience of using Convergence’s CODI to integrate a number of systems and save $12,000 per month!
Watch the interview here.
My name is Shaun Elvines. The company I represent is Glasscorp Limited. My current role at Glasscorp is Warehouse Manager. My primary responsibilities would be a “Jack of all Trades”. I can do everything from running the warehouse to operating the machinery to customer services to everything. Over the years that I’ve been here I’ve built up how to do everything across the board. I’ve got a pretty wide range of skills.
The endpoints or applications that have been integrated are Attache, Mainchain, the ZEST platform by Zeald and a couple of custom software pieces that we’ve had written from other companies.
The CODI integration, we use for multiple things. One is the integration between our website and accounting software, which is Attache. The other one is between Attache and our freight system, which allows us to do automatic trade adding and tracking details added back into customer invoices and things like that on dispatch.
The processes the integration automates, includes customer orders that have been placed on the website by automatically importing them into Attache, which saves the guys from having to rekey those orders, which speeds up a lot of time so they only have to concentrate on keying any other orders that have come in in other ways like phone or email, which has been a great help.
Another process it automates is between Attache and the Mainchain system. So, all our orders for that day get automatically uploaded into the Mainchain system so that when the guys scan them to dispatch the orders they’re sitting there. All they have to do is populate the information that they’re sending out. They don’t have to put in the customer details. That’s already there. From that Mainchain system it also puts back into the freight cost for any customers that pay freight automatically. The guys don’t have to go back into the picking slip and add a freight line or anything like that. It’s all done through an automatic process. We also don’t have to do the invoicing either. It automatically does that on the dispatch as well, which is another automated process that’s been quite handy.
Another automated process is on one of our other systems that we have for sending out spare parts, the proformas and all that from the other system are automatically imported into Attache so that we have a record of it in Attache. The automatic invoicing gets done from that other spare parts system as well.
“There’s a lot of things we don’t have to do manually any more. Everything is setup to be automated as well as our dashboard.”
The dashboard that we have for how many orders have come in that day is all automated via CODI as well direct from Attache and the freighting system.
Another automated part is the information from Attache is sent directly to our website. Pricing, customer details, products – whatever we change in Attache is updated on the website in particular areas.
The CODI integration has been in operation at Glasscorp for five or six years. Manual effort saved is quite a lot. We’ve tried to automate a lot of things to take the human error out of things. It saves, in the dispatching of orders, about 10 minutes an order. It makes the dispatching side of it more simple. There are not that many processes that they need to think about. From that aspect, it’s quite good.
And the dashboard side of it makes it great! We never really knew were we stood orders wise. How many had come in each day. It takes away the time factor of having to work out where we are because we can see each day how many orders we have. The guys have found it quite helpful in finding orders and making sure orders don’t get lost.
There has been quite a lot of time and manual labour saving. If I was to put a dollar value to the savings of dispatching the orders saving about 10 minutes an order, we average about 180 orders a day. So, if we were to take a $20 hourly rate over a month that’s 30 hours a day, over a 20 day month
“… works out about $12,000 a month saving on just having something automated to help.”
I guess that’s why we can average 180 orders a day because of the automated process that’s been put in place.
Yes, I would say that I am happy with how it was implemented initially. Obviously, when you’re doing these integrations, you never quite know how they are going to go. You are always going to have minor things that you haven’t thought about because when you’re doing it you can’t think about everything. You can try and map it out as much as you can but until you actually have something that’s working you can’t know everything. But pretty happy with how it was all done.
That’s what we found over the years when we’re trying to do anything: You can think about it as much as you like but you are always going to miss something until you actually work with it and you go “Oh yeah, I forgot about that”.
I’m totally happy with the ongoing support from Convergence. We have one person who is dedicated to Glasscorp. He’s pretty switched-on and good at what he does. He’s pretty much told us that whatever we can think of, we just have to tell him what our end goal is and he’ll come up with the solution to get us that goal. We are totally happy with how the support has been.
Whenever we have an issue, doesn’t matter how small the issue is, we get the support that’s needed to get it fixed as quickly as possible.
Stephen has been great. He’s taught me a lot over the years doing the whole integration stuff. Things I would never have known before. He’s straight to the point. He’ll let you know if he thinks you’re wrong. People can sugar-coat things but it’s best to be straight-up.
I totally would recommend Convergence to other people. In previous conversations I have mentioned Convergence for our integration. Whenever we are showing people around and they see the dashboard as one of the first things I always tell them that Convergence does the integration for us between our accounting software and the dashboards.
I’m all about supporting people that help us out.