With a growing catalogue of specialist products imported from around the world, wholesale distributor Reid & Twiname called on Abel to optimise their supply chain processes, from sales and inventory management to despatch and financial control.

No business thrives for over 100 years without knowing how to adapt.

Established in 1924 to supply parts and trimmings for horse-drawn coaches and a burgeoning automotive industry, Reid & Twiname is now a leading business-to-business supplier to New Zealand’s motor body hardware, transport and outdoor textile industries.

Over the years, as these industries grew, Reid & Twiname expanded to meet their needs. The New Zealand-owned company now supplies over 2500 locally sourced and overseas products – everything from eyelets, truck toolboxes and classic car accessories to automated awnings, marine carpets and the durable fabrics on the seats of Auckland City buses, trains and ferries.

“We see our business as a partnership with our customers,” says Managing Director Grant Stewart. “We need them as much as they need us, so we’re big on building long-term relationships and we do that by providing them with high-quality products and unbeatable service.

“If a product fails or they’re struggling with something, customers know we’ll do what it takes to fix it, even if it’s not necessarily the fault of the product. That’s who we are. We’re all in this together.”

Customers also rely on Reid & Twiname’s industry experience and vast product knowledge. Grant, for one, has worked for the company for 44 years, and jokes that “my CV has only one line – Reid & Twiname.” Having started as a lunch boy and moved up the ladder through warehouse, sales and customer service roles, he knew every area of the business inside and out before becoming Managing Director in 2012.

Two years later, after years of relying on slow and fragmented manual systems to manage supply chain operations, Grant and his team decided they needed an ERP system to integrate and streamline their business processes and optimise overall efficiency.

“Our old systems were a mixed bag of paper spreadsheets and manual tasks,” says Finance and Administration Manager Bernard Rooza. “But with Abel we saw an opportunity not only to get rid of this manual work and improve our processes, but to fully integrate them into one system. That was our motivation. It was a big plus to have all our modules working together without the need for add-on systems.”

A key driver for choosing Abel ERP, Bernard says, was improved inventory management. “Now, with a single integrated system, we always have a good handle on what’s in stock at any point, and our stock reports are aligned with financials. It makes a big difference.”

One of the first major benefits Abel delivered was to automate costings for Reid & Twiname’s wide-ranging inventory of products, which are imported from over 300 suppliers in the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, China, Japan and other countries. Before Abel, one person spent most of a week every month manually calculating the cost of overseas freight, duties and other import fees for every product.

“With Abel, we now get accurate landed costs and true costs of every product with just the push of a button,” Grant says. “This is a massive improvement that has delivered huge savings, which alone enabled us to recover the project costs in less than a year.”

Thanks to Abel’s bin management functionality, Reid & Twiname have also significantly accelerated order picking at their 30,000-square-foot Auckland warehouse. Instead of relying on memory or guesswork to pick orders, the warehouse team now receive picklists from Abel with exact bin locations and the most efficient picking order. Grant says this feature delivers big savings in operational efficiency, especially for their monthly restocking shipments to the company’s 11,000-square-foot Christchurch warehouse.

“We ship two containers every month with about 500 items,” Grant says, “so you can imagine how much time we save now because of Abel. When we first informed our warehouse supervisor about this feature, he was overwhelmed!”

Grant says another selling point was Abel’s Mobile Sales App, which helps the sales team on the road instantly share and display information with customers – like product information, availability and pricing – and then submit orders directly into Abel.

“It’s a significant tool for us,” he says. “Abel keeps enhancing it by adding more information our Area Managers require, and they swear by it. They don’t have to waste time logging into their laptops and syncing with wi-fi. We look more professional and it enhances our ability to get the sale over the line, and to successfully complete the transaction.”

As finance manager, Bernard says Abel’s core financial tools and automation make his job easier while improving the company’s bottom line.

“In our old system, our month-end close was an absolute mission,” he says. “It had too many manual processes and the only way to retain old reports was to print them out. With Abel, the close just happens every month and it’s a non-event. This is another massive benefit for us.”

Grant says another game changer has been Abel’s Credit Limit feature, which establishes maximum outstanding balances for each customer. “With Abel, our collection rate has improved significantly,” he says. “This is a big boost to our working capital and gives us a competitive edge.”

Twelve years on, Grant says Abel continues to add value to Reid & Twiname’s business. Future improvements include automating more inventory management processes, sales forecasting and enhancing the website so customers can see information on inventory, availability and pricing.

“We trust Abel and see them as an important partner,” Grant says. “I especially like having someone who knows our business and can talk to us in a language we understand. They are passionate about what they do, and have been exceptional in resolving issues, quickly.”

Source: this article was originally sourced from Abel.

Faced with the challenge of replacing an aging proprietary system, a top manufacturer of hydraulic cylinders selected Abel® ERP to streamline production, inventory and financial management.

In the world of heavy machinery, hydraulic cylinders are the unsung heroes. They provide the muscles that power the bulldozers, excavators and dump trucks that keep construction, forestry, agriculture and other industries humming along.

“I never expected that we’d be operating in the system on day one of the go live.”

For more than 35 years, Christchurch-based Victor Hydraulics has been designing and manufacturing bespoke, specialist and stock cylinders for a broad range of customers around the world.

“Our business is built on innovation and collaborative engineering that meet the precise requirements of our customers,” says finance manager Estelle Williams. “They rely on us and come back to us because of our expertise and quality products.”

To ensure optimal performance and reliability of their products in punishing environments, Victor Hydraulics sources a wide range of materials globally for their cylinders, which are built in their Hornby facility using the latest CNC-controlled machines and other specialist equipment.

For years, production and other processes were monitored closely by a proprietary ERP system. But in 2021 the company realised their software had become outdated and unstable, and they began a comprehensive search for a new ERP system with robust production workflows.

“We started by looking at about fifteen systems and compared them on basic criteria before narrowing our search to three,” Williams says. “Then we conducted in-depth interviews and customer visits to see the systems in action before we decided.”

Abel also had the endorsement of a former Victor Hydraulics colleague who was successfully using Abel in similar ways at his new job.

“In the end, we liked Abel’s functionality, flexibility and collaborative approach,” she says. ”Abel’s value for money and affordable licensing also made Abel a no brainer”.

Another critical factor in Abel’s favour was their implementation methodology, which was clearly set out from the start: two months of preparation, two weeks of on-site handholding during the go-live, and a program of part-time support during the first two months of live running. At first, Williams didn’t think such a short implementation timeframe was possible. “No one else offered this, so I kept asking, ‘Can you really do this?’ But Abel did.”

“I was blown away. I never expected that we’d be operating in the system on day one of the go live. After two weeks with Abel on site, everything was in and running. Abel stayed with us until we were comfortable.”

Victor Hydraulics now runs nearly all of their business processes in Abel – automating their workflow from sales quotes and purchase orders to production planning and scheduling, ensuring quick response to customer orders, accurate delivery times, and precise control of inventory and costs.

“I’ve used other ERP systems but Abel is the easiest I’ve ever worked on,” Williams says. “It’s intuitive, fast and reliable. We have everything in one place, our printing and paperwork have gone away. No one wants to go back to the old system.”

Williams says Abel’s built-in agility has delivered the key requirement Victor Hydraulics needed in a new system: improved production management.

“We often get urgent orders and need to change production scheduling,” she says. “This used to be time-consuming and production plans frequently got discarded. Now we can quickly check the loading on routes, add resources or another shift to avoid any bottlenecks.”

“It used to take three hours to do a production plan, now it takes seconds. It’s made a big difference to our business.”

Abel has made it easier for Victor Hydraulics to track critical inventory data like stock write-offs and shortages and key productivity outcomes: job completion time, staff downtime, chargeable hours, and profitability per product and client.

Williams says Abel has also cut the time required to close their monthly trial balance from 10 working days to five.

“It’s fantastic to have such fast access to data you can trust,” Williams says. “As the finance manager, my biggest concern from the start was ensuring we posted accurate data for audits, and this has never been a problem. I know the data I’m getting is accurate and I have complete confidence that when I deliver a financial statement, there won’t be any questions.”

Three years after going live with Abel, Williams says Victor Hydraulics continues to work collaboratively with the Abel team to improve productivity and overall efficiency.

“We have a very good relationship with Abel. If we have a new idea or want to change a process, we just reach out. It makes a big difference having that kind of support and knowing that the Abel team has our back.”

Source: This article was originally sourced from Abel

With the reasons to replace legacy systems growing as fast as their business, an award-winning wholesale bakery chose Abel® to automate workflows, provide real-time data, and drive greater efficiency and quality control in one ERP system.

Anyone with a sweet tooth has likely heard of the Original Foods Baking Co. or tasted their cakes, muffins or one of the 70,000 donuts they make every day.

From humble beginnings in 1991, supplying donuts to local takeaway stores, Original Foods has grown into a multimillion-dollar, large-scale bakery manufacturer based in Wigram, Christchurch with over 100 products.

“Let’s say, we were spoiled with opportunities to improve.”

They’re a proud leading name in the New Zealand baking industry, and their treats can be found in major supermarkets and food service distributors across New Zealand, Australia, and the Pacific Islands.

Despite all this growth, the award-winning Christchurch company retains the fun and cheeky personality of a start-up. Their tasty treats are marketed creatively with colourful branding, and their logo features Ollie, a cheeky smiling monkey licking his lips.

“We still pride ourselves on quality products and delivering a fresh, home-baked taste in everything we make,” says CFO Tracey McMenamin. “We’re just making more of them now.”

Tonnes more, it turns out. Every week 80 tonnes of dough and other ingredients are mixed, baked and packaged at their purpose-built facility, using the latest production technologies and automation.

But until recently, McMenamin says, the business was missing one critical ingredient: a robust, integrated ERP system to streamline operations and comply with food safety standards and regulations mandated by the Ministry of Primary Industries.

“Our old ERP system was limited and lacked integration, and we had become extremely dependent on manual processes,” she says.

“Spreadsheets were a big problem. There’s no data integrity when multiple people are using and editing them. Sometimes if I needed to update a spreadsheet, I had to go into another user’s office while they were out and turn off their computer.”

Another impetus for a new ERP system was the risk of a costly product recall or quality issue, which are often difficult to isolate and manage using manual systems.

“Paper systems don’t give you the confidence to respond quickly or accurately,” McMenamin says. “That’s a big risk for any food manufacturer, especially if you have a large range of products and ingredients. We knew we needed real-time visibility and traceability across our supply chain.”

Another Christchurch food manufacturer had recommended Abel, but Original Foods looked at several other systems before choosing Abel in 2024.

“The Abel team was awesome to deal with from the beginning,” McMenamin says. “Our business is complicated, but they were willing to focus on the nitty-gritty to get it right.”

Abel’s first fundamental improvement was automated batch tracking. Abel uses a system of bar-coded labels, printed with batch numbers and best-before dates, to track every ingredient and product in the Original Foods range. This provides full traceability and quality control from the raw materials to the dispatched goods.

“Whether for a recall or a safety audit, it’s a big relief to have a system we can trust to manage problems and mitigate risks for our business,” she says.

McMenamin admits the transition to a new system hasn’t always been a piece of cake, especially on the production floor.

“Everyone is loving it now, but the process exposed problems we didn’t know we had,” she says, adding wryly, “Let’s say, we were spoiled with opportunities to improve.”

One such area was inventory management. Before Abel, stock takes were conducted manually once a month, but there was no certainty the data was accurate and in-depth analysis was difficult. But now ingredient usage is precisely captured on the production floor via touch screens and scanners, delivering real-time visibility of stock levels.

With Abel, McMenamin and other managers can accurately track raw material levels and analyse manufacturing variances, yields and other critical data at any time. At first, the data they saw was not good.

“We discovered our efficiency levels were nothing like we thought,” McMenamin says. “We had a higher rate of raw material usage and a greater amount of waste. But Abel has helped us address these problems and we’ve become so much more efficient. We’ve also worked to get staff more involved in the process, and they are seeing the difference Abel can make.”

Abel has also helped simplify their Customer Order entry with an automated solution from Abel Associate Acume.

McMenamin says Abel has reduced costs and errors, shrunk cycle times and improved cash flow.

As any financial controller will attest, access to accurate and timely data is a game-changer. McMenamin is no exception. She says Abel has made her job easier, providing a real-time view of all the consolidated and detailed financial information she needs to prepare accurate financial statements, manage risks and gain valuable insights into the company’s performance.

“Sometimes you don’t think you need to change systems until you do it,” she says. “Now that we have done it, we certainly see a lot of light ahead.”

McMenamin rattles off a list of future benefits Abel offers: automated production scheduling; seamless integrations with third-party logistics (3PL) providers; and Abel BI, an interactive suite of graphical business intelligence reports developed and accessed in Microsoft Power BI.

“Having a robust system and a single source of truth makes us a better business,” she says. “We also see the potential benefits Abel will offer us when we really get things humming.”

Source: This article was originally sourced from Abel

After years of manually managing complex food safety and testing processes, a premium New Zealand honey producer called on Abel® to provide greater data accuracy, traceability, quality control and inventory management in a single, easy-to-use ERP system.

The New Zealand Health Food Company (NZHF) knows that businesses must change and adapt if they want to succeed. Since 1988, this small, family-run company has evolved from a supplier of natural ingredients to a retailer of honey, bee products and natural supplements, to a leading exporter of premium manuka honey.

In 2020, not long after the first Covid-19 shutdown, NZHF embarked on another big change to optimise efficiency and safeguard their business by replacing their manual systems with Abel.

“We may be a small company but it doesn’t look like that now.”

“Our whole business depends on accurate data,” says Geoff Paterson, NZHF’s Operations Manager. “Before Abel, every bit of data was being collected and recorded on spreadsheets and other manual systems. This was both time-consuming and error-prone, and it was a nightmare.

“We had no real-time visibility of our critical data, no end-to-end traceability of our products and no clear, accurate understanding of how our business was performing. Nothing was right.”

Paterson was no stranger to ERP systems, having worked before on three installations of SAP at Fortune 500 and other large companies. “Those were big and complicated systems that took a long time to implement and run smoothly, and they were hated for years to come by users,” he said.

“But Abel is different. They spent a lot of time with us before we went live, getting to know our business and what we needed to do, so the transition was easy and everyone was on board right away.”

Sitting at his desk inside NZHF’s Christchurch office, Paterson holds up a jar of honey from their premium Manuka South range and explains why one 250-gram jar sells for $25 and another $2500.

Manuka honey’s antibacterial properties are measured by the presence of methylglyoxal (MGO), a compound that appears in higher levels in manuka than other honey. The higher the MGO content, the purer and more expensive the honey.

Paterson says beekeepers do their best to ensure honeybees collect nectar only from manuka flowers, but the bees also forage on other flowers, so it’s critical for pricing and export requirements that NZHF accurately measure levels of MGO and other quality factors like UMF (Unique Manuka Factor).

Every drum of honey that NZHF buys is now registered in Abel with a unique code, and every jar of honey produced has a batch number, providing a transparent and verifiable record of the honey’s journey from the hive to the end consumer.

As the honey ages and is blended through the production process, the drums are tested frequently for toxins, MGO levels and other quality markers. Abel captures test results per-unique drum from internal testing and external laboratories.

“We now have all our ducks in a row,” Paterson says. “Everything we need is tracked in Abel and can be brought up in seconds with one unique code for us or any outside auditors to see.”

Abel’s Bill of Materials (BOM) combines materials, overheads, labour and machine costs to assist with cost calculations. Abels BOMs also provide operator instructions to assist with the manufacturing process. Timings in the Bill of Materials set the spans used for production planning. This gives planners improved visibility over actual costs and timings versus planned costs and timings. Better visibility can inform selling prices and improve the bottom line. With Abel, stock turnover has gone from a negative to eight times a year.

“Having the right data has made all the difference in the world for us,” he says. “We can run all BOMs, costings and margin reports through Abel for a thousand unique codes. We may be a small company but it doesn’t look like that now.”

Most of NZHF’s staff use Abel every day across production, operations, sales and accounts.

“Abel has been a godsend. We wouldn’t be doing this well without it. Everything we need can be done in Abel. Sure, some of the ways you do things have to change but not a lot. You don’t need any other software packages. It’s truly a one-stop shop.”

One of NZHF’s biggest achievements is visible on the website of their Manuka South brand – a jar of UMF 35+ “Legacy” Limited Reserve honey, priced at $2,499.

It is described as the “world’s most luxurious Manuka honey,” with a potency achieved by “only 0.03% of all tested UMF manuka honey globally,” certified by over 100 independent tests and two Ministry for Primary Industries-accredited laboratories.

Anyone who buys this honey – or any of the less-expensive jars in the Manuka South range – can certify the authenticity of their honey’s potency any time they want, simply by entering the batch number online and clicking to see the lab results.

Paterson says NZHF continues to work with the Abel to find new ways to improve their business and evolve.

“It was like Abel was built for us,” he says. “This isn’t a feeling I had with other ERP systems. Everyone here has bought into it. We even talk to each other using Abel lingo. What more can I say.”

Source: This article was originally sourced from Abel 

To manage the complex quality control standards for exporting manuka honey, Cosana chose Abel® ERP to provide the traceability, flexibility and ease of use they needed to meet growing demand and optimise efficiency.

Manuka honey is often called liquid gold. Sourced in New Zealand from the scarce flowers of the native manuka bush, manuka honey contains unique health properties that have created a huge global demand and prices as high as $5,000 a jar.

Chris Bowman understands the value of manuka honey better than most. As the innovative leader of several honey exporting companies since 2009, he has worked hard to improve honey-processing standards and promote a booming New Zealand industry that generates $400 million a year in exports.

“Even with a team of rocket scientists, you won’t realise the full value of a system if staff find it hard to use”

This sweet success has also spawned plenty of counterfeit products, making it more incumbent on the industry to assure customers they’re buying genuine manuka honey.

“It’s critical to our export reputation to keep producing high-quality honey products that consumers know are safe and authentic,” says Chris, who is also a member of Apiculture New Zealand’s standards and compliance group. “We now have the rigorous industry standards and mandatory testing in place to back that up.”

Chris joined Cosana as Chief Executive and part-owner in 2021, with a focus on streamlining the manufacturing and quality control of Cosana’s products: from pure manuka honey and multifloral blends to propolis tinctures, royal jelly, lozenges and lip balm.

The first step was to create a purpose-built factory to process up to 300 tonnes of honey a year. The new high-tech complex, overlooking Lake Taupo, now provides Cosana with a one-stop facility to produce, package and export products to customers around the world.

The next step, Chris says, was to find an integrated system to automate and control their supply chain, quality certification and production processes; and deliver real-time traceability of their supply chain, from the drums of bulk honey to the despatch of packaged products.

Choosing Abel, Chris says, was an easy decision.

“I wouldn’t work with anyone else. I’ve used Abel for the last twelve years at three different companies.

Everything starts with the bees whose honey Cosana sources from the hives of about 25 independent beekeepers from Kaitaia to Bluff.  Every drum of honey procured is registered in Abel with a unique batch code, and independently tested up to 10 times during various production processes for toxins, chemical markers and manuka DNA.

Each test result is recorded in Abel, including the measurement methylglyoxal (MGO) – the vital ingredient in manuka honey responsible for its antibacterial, anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. Depending on test results, some batches of honey might need to be re-graded to a different inventory code over time, where revaluing also needs to take place.

Accurate MGO levels are critical, Chris says, because manuka honey ages like wine: the higher the MGO level, the greater the therapeutic value and the higher the price it commands. For example, Cosana’s 250g containers of honey vary in price from $6 to $180 depending on their lab-certified level of MGO, which is clearly marked on every label of honey.

“Automating price adjustments is a true testament to Abel’s flexibility and collaboration to find seamless solutions for critical business issues and industry challenges.”

Chris says this includes a suite of integrated software solutions from Abel Associates, like automated accounts payable system PlusOne from Acume that has simplified Cosana’s invoicing process. “It saves us time and gives me the real-time data I need to manage our cashflow.”

Another key advantage to Abel is ease of use. Chris says the Taupo team has taken an instant liking to Abel, whether they’re using barcode scanners and touchscreens on the factory floor, PCs in the office or a tablet at home.

“Even with a team of rocket scientists, you won’t realise the full value of a system if staff find it hard to use,” he says. “Abel simplifies our workflow so tasks like stock takes, honey grading and tracking despatched goods can be done quickly and confidently by our team.

“Abel is so easy to use that our chartered accountant used it to access documents and data for our year-end accounts, cutting his time and his fees in half.”

By all accounts, Cosana is just getting started. A year after launching the Taupo plant, Chris says they’re making plans to increase production and add new products to Cosana’s range.

“Without a doubt, we know Abel has all the flexibility and functionality we need to grow and succeed, as well as the support and innovation we might need along the way. The rest is up to us.”

(Read more about Chris Bowman’s history with Abel in this earlier case study.)

Source: This article was originally sourced from Abel

As a former rugby player, Dairy Technology Services CEO Gavin Thwaites understands how important expertise, vision and agility are for a team’s success. But he also knows for organisations to stay on top of their game they need something more: a high-performing system that ensures everyone can make key decisions at any time.

“It’s all about the customer,” Gavin says. “If you spend too much time and resources on inefficient processes and have no real-time visibility of your critical business data, it’s hard to be responsive to your customers. We needed to change that.”

Since Gavin joined DTS in early 2019, change has been constant. After five years under the Tru-Test brand, the Hamilton company became a stand-alone business again, operating under a revitalised DTS brand.

“It’s making it easier for the whole organisation to succeed.”

Gavin says one thing that’s not changing is DTS’s core business. For 20 years, the multimillion-dollar company has provided high-quality stainless steel milk vats, milk refrigeration systems and dairy automation systems to New Zealand farmers. DTS’s Normanby Plant in Taranaki manufactures 95 percent of the milk vats on New Zealand farms, and their products and services help farmers comply with the rigorous standards of the milk production industry.

But Gavin says DTS had no choice but to change the way the business operated if they wanted to improve their bottom line and customer focus while growing the business. For Gavin, this transformation couldn’t start without a new ERP system.

“Our legacy JDE system was archaic, inefficient and costly to run” he says. “Capturing and sharing data was disjointed and time-consuming. With so many multiple, error-prone manual entries, it was also impossible to get an accurate, real-time view of our key business indicators.”

DTS urgently needed a new ERP system as the corporate divestment dictated they migrate to a new system by September 2019. “We not only had to identify the right ERP platform and scope the project, but also needed it up and running in nine months,” Gavin says. “That’s not a lot of time. So it was critical to find an ERP vendor that could match both our requirements and our urgency.”

After considering several ERP systems, including JDE and other tier-one vendors, DTS chose Abel.

“Every time we looked at our choices, Abel came out tops in our evaluation criteria,” Gavin says. “Abel not only offered the best value and flexibility, but they also took the time to understand our business – and it shows.”

Just six weeks after going live, Gavin says Abel is already driving significant improvements across the business by capturing, consolidating and delivering timely, accurate data for a wide range of users working at two locations and on the road.

Abel has also streamlined the processes for service jobs, replacing another lengthy and disjointed paper-based process with an automated workflow. Gavin says their order-to-invoice process for service jobs used to take one to two months to complete, now it takes one to two days. Field technicians now use tablets to input service reports directly into Abel, eliminating a process that often involved two or three manual data entries and took weeks to integrate into the system. Gavin says “With a single point of entry, these jobs can now be completed right away, triggering accurate invoices and perfect visibility across the business”.

“We couldn’t be happier with Abel,” he says. “Automating our processes has made us so much more efficient. We have fewer people working on manual tasks, we’ve cut costs and we now have the traceability and visibility we needed across our business. That’s making it easier for the whole organisation to succeed.”

What’s more, Gavin says, Abel CRM provides complete visibility of the sales cycle, from the very first lead to the newest quotes and orders.

“With fast access to reliable, integrated data at any time, our leaders have their fingers on the pulse of the business and that empowers them to make better decisions. Thanks to Abel, we’ve positively changed our behaviors and that’s driving better outcomes for us and our customers.”

Gavin attributes the quick implementation and start-up to Abel’s expertise, keen understanding of DTS’s business and easy integration of their multiple data sources.

“From the start, our relationship with Abel was a partnership,” he says. “We relied heavily on their ERP experience, and they invested the time to get to know our business. I can honestly say they know more about our business than most of our employees.”

Using Abel, along with a specialised reporting and analytics dashboard from Abel partner Virtual BI, Gavin now has complete visibility of the latest financial reports and KPIs, from open jobs and call center metrics to the status of prospects in the sales pipeline, and debtor and creditor balances.

Whatever the company’s future holds, Gavin says he’s confident Abel’s scalability and flexibility will enable DTS to grow without constraint. But for now, he’s pleased with how much Abel has delivered in such a short time.

“Some ERP systems take many months to implement and never provide the desired business objectives,” he says. “By matching our urgency and delivering what we needed in just a few months, Abel more than rose to the challenge.”

As both the CEO of a leading company and a one-time rugby player, Gavin knows full well that performing with pace can make all the difference in the world.

Source: This article was originally sourced from Abel

When NZ Drinks decided to transform their business model, the Waikato beverage company chose Abel ERP to fully automate its supply chain and drive the efficiency, integration and traceability required to succeed in the demanding retail grocery industry.

For Director Tony Vesper and Kyle Osborne, NZ Drinks began in 2010 with a clear vision – to provide pure New Zealand spring water that was natural, affordable and sustainably bottled. Tony and Kyle planned to carry out their vision by outsourcing all the bottling.

“Automation has been the key to our successful growth.”

“We started initially as a marketing company, but after a few years and with the business established, the next step was to build our own bottling factory”.

Thinking big turned out to be a watershed moment. Built above an aquifer in Pokeno, the high-tech factory features a fully automated bottling line that can produce up to 220 million bottles of water a year in bottles they make themselves.  Most bottles are made from rPET (recycled plastic) – making NZ Drinks the leading bottled water producer in New Zealand. More significantly, since their new factory opened in 2016, the multimillion dollar company’s annual revenue has nearly tripled.

“Automation has been the key to our successful growth,” Kyle says. “It’s given us the efficiency and the cost and quality controls we need to thrive in a very competitive industry where there’s little margin for error.”

To achieve this scale of production and overall efficiency, NZ Drinks realised that, before the new factory started operating, they needed a more robust and flexible ERP system. After reviewing other systems, they chose Abel to streamline all the supply chain processes.

“Abel impressed us with their flexibility and reasonable pricing, but more importantly they understood our vision and our industry,” Kyle says. “We now have a powerful, reliable business management system that has not only automated our processes but has also seamlessly integrated them with those of our customers and vendors.”

At their new 3,500-square-metre facility, the signs of automation extend from the front door to the factory floor. Visitors use a lobby touch-screen to sign in and obtain a personalised barcoded badge while an instant notification of their arrival is sent to their host. Staff start and end their shifts by entering their personal ID code into an automated time-tracking touch screen.

The factory itself – the largest, fastest and most efficient water bottling facility in New Zealand – is a model of 21^st Century productivity. The bottling line now operates virtually round the clock, producing the company’s Pure NZ brand of still and sparkling water, as well as private label manufacturing for some of New Zealand’s largest retail chains.

Every hour 27,500 preforms are blown into bottles, filled with spring water using hygienic stainless-steel equipment, and capped and labelled as they roll smoothly along conveyor belts. Robotic machines then shrink-wrap finished products and pack them into bar-coded pallets that are stored in racks until they’re loaded onto trucks for next-day delivery.

In the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) industry, speed is essential for both production and meeting the exacting delivery expectations of customers.

Kyle says Abel’s end-to-end automation and integration of real-time information enables NZ Drinks to meet these supply chain challenges. Everything from customer orders and dispatches through to invoicing are linked by direct electronic data interchange (EDI) with customer and third-party logistics (3PL) vendors systems. All EDI processes are handled by Abel’s built-in EDI integrator, which manages the inbound and outbound electronic documents and messages, eliminating the need for manual inputs.

It all begins with detailed product forecasts by individual stores that drive precise forecast manufacturing and stock requirements, such as managing critical and varying lead times for preformed bottles, caps and other materials whether they’re coming from Auckland or Asia.

Production is scheduled and monitored using EDI links to the bottling line equipment. Once finished products are wrapped on bar-coded pallets, they’re scanned with handheld devices and moved, using EDI, by third-party logistics companies from the factory or storage depots across New Zealand. From the moment a customer places an order, no one needs to key in any data.

Abel’s barcode architecture also ensures that NZ Drinks meets the end-to-end traceability required in the food and beverage industry, enabling them to track dispatched products to a unique pallet identification number in the event of any quality or safety issue.

“We couldn’t run so efficiently and effectively without this scale of automation and EDI integration. This saves time on staff resources, avoids costly shortages and manual errors, and all but guarantees we can deliver what we promised exactly on time. For our business, that’s critical.”

With a new factory and all this automation, Kyle says NZ Drinks has no plans to slow down. They’ve just finished a multi-million-dollar bottling-line upgrade to facilitate growth. They’re also planning to grow their export market and double their revenue over the next couple of years.

“For NZ Drinks, automation was a great decision, and Abel’s robustness and flexibility provides us with a great foundation for growth,” Kyle says. “If we wanted to quadruple our business tomorrow, we wouldn’t have to change anything.”

Kyle says Abel has also improved their back-office processes, from automated time-sheeting and accounts payable to financials and reporting. Thanks to a real-time business intelligence tool, Kyle and other senior managers can monitor critical KPI measures on an hourly, daily and monthly basis.

“We’re glad we chose Abel,” Kyle says. “They’ve worked closely with us to configure Abel to suit our business and this has helped us surpass our original vision. For a system of this complexity, it’s easy to use and intuitive. I can’t imagine there’s any more functionality we’ll need.”

Source: This article was originally sourced from Abel

Faced with a major market downturn and high overheads, a top global manufacturer of high-performance machinery worked with their ERP provider Abel Software to automate front-end processes and improve business intelligence – driving greater efficiency, higher turnover and growth.

Christchurch-based GTech began operating in 1989 as a supplier of meat-rendering machines to the New Zealand market. Since then, the company has grown into a multimillion- dollar manufacturer of specialised centrifuge equipment for a range of industries across Asia, Australia, North America, South America and Africa.

“Improving efficiency has not only increased our margins more than we expected, it’s also boosted morale.”

“In our industry, success comes down to innovation, performance and price,” General Manager Will Colenso says. “GTech has thrived because we design and manufacture the best-performing machines on the market, with IP- based technology and a low cost of ownership.”

But when Will took over as General Manager in 2017, GTech’s largest export market, the U.S. oil and gas industry was in a slump. With sales down and overheads high, Will decided if GTech wanted to improve their performance and prepare for growth they needed to become smarter and more efficient.

“I was convinced we could at least double our turnover, without throwing more money into our overheads,” he says. “but to do so, we had to focus on driving efficiency in our front-end processes-everything from customer quotes and orders to production assembly-because if you don’t get this part right, you won’t get the rest of your business right.”

GTech had implemented Abel ERP in 2011 to provide an integrated and flexible business management system to manage production, planning, inventory, equipment designs and financials across their sites in the United States, Australia and New Zealand.

Will was new to Abel, so he worked closely with Abel’s Christchurch office to drive GTech’s new supply-chain improvements. “Collaboration was key. The Abel team took the time to understand the issues we were facing, and our wild ideas, and delivered the improvements we were determined to achieve, even when they didn’t seem possible.”

One major change GTech made was to implement Abel’s parallel scheduling functionality to optimize their production planning. Instead of scheduling sub-assembly jobs individually, GTech now uses a parent job to automatically merge components, BOMs and complex routes for jobs (some with as many as 80 parts). With this new top-down approach, every job, subassembly and machine can be scheduled in parallel or sequentially from the one job number.

Thanks to this automation, GTech is now meeting more aggressive production demands for its biggest selling product – a 2.5ton, $300,000 decanter centrifuge called Echo 3, used in the oil and gas industry to reduce waste and recycle substances like drilling mud.

“We are now committed to putting one of these machines on a direct flight to Houston once a week. Without Abel’s functionality, we couldn’t do it. It just takes one thing to ruin a schedule, but now our schedule works smoothly, and we get it done.”

Overall work-center efficiency has also soared. Will says GTech recently charged 96.7 percent of its monthly labour, up from as low as 70 percent in previous months.

“Improving efficiency has not only increased our margins more than we expected, but it’s also boosted morale,” he says. “Staff used to get frustrated if they had a job to do and materials weren’t there. We don’t have that problem anymore.”

Streamlining the quotation workflow has also helped GTech take another significant step forward. Previously, sales staff manually created complex quotes on paper with inventory parts and then sent them to engineers for completion, a process that often took three weeks to complete. Switching their quotation process to Abel means customer quotes can be built using BOMs and sub-BOMs to accurately break down the costs. The sales team now produces detailed quotes in only two or three days, with BOMs, drawings and other necessary information already attached. “It used to be a time-consuming and costly process,” he says, “and often by the time we had sent our quote to a customer they’d already taken their business elsewhere. Our new process is simple, and it has significantly reduced labour costs. Because the quotes are now in Abel, we can instantly generate the customer order and the job using the detail in the quote and send the job to the factory floor within hours of the quote being accepted.”

Will says other processes that they switched to Abel are also delivering big dividends:

• GTech’s purchase ordering process, that previously took one-person hours a day to do manually, is now completed using an Abel purchasing screen in only thirty minutes, twice a week.
• Moving GTech’s commercial invoicing for overseas shipments from Excel® to Abel was quick to configure and produced massive time savings for their business.

“I don’t understand why some companies don’t want to invest in software configuration or enhancements that improve their businesses,” he says. “It’s just crazy. I knew if I spent money I’d get it back tenfold, but I’ve recovered it a hundredfold.”

Abel’s in-built CRM functionality has also become important in GTech’s drive for new business. With complete visibility of the sales cycle, Will says, “Abel’s CRM does everything you’d expect from a CRM system, enabling me to easily track, value, assess and prioritize every opportunity we’re working on.” New business may require a lot of time and represent only a small part of your turnover, but Will says, “It’s the incubator of your business and you have to do it to support long-term growth. Abel’s CRM is an invaluable tool.”

Abel’s breadth of functionality provides GTech all the real-time information they need to accurately analyse and measure performance over all areas of the business. Thanks to a specialised reporting and analytics package from Abel partner Virtual BI, Will receives daily business intelligence reports on key criteria, from sales and invoicing updates to work-center efficiency. “With other tools it can take 10 or 20 hours a week to run these kinds of reports, but now I get them automatically every morning wherever I am. It’s incredible.”

With all these improvements, GTech is well-positioned to meet their goals for higher turnover and future growth. One figure that stands out for Will is GTech’s increase in margins. “We’re a whole lot more efficient,” he says. “We’ve improved our margins, and I’m confident we can increase turnover significantly without adding any overheads.

“Abel has made a big difference to our business and I would definitely recommend Abel ERP to other businesses. And I don’t say that lightly. Abel’s team went out of their way to help us and drive the changes we needed. I have an increased respect for the Abel team and their product for getting us where we wanted to go.”

Source: This article was originally sourced from Abel

After a mislabeled product exposed a critical business risk, a leading manufacturer of gourmet pasta chose Abel ERP to deliver the traceability, quality control and flexibility needed both to safeguard and streamline their fast-growing business.

Husband and wife team Phil Bennett and Linda Murphy know a great opportunity when they see one. Seventeen years ago, they bought a fledgling pasta-making company and turned their passion for pasta into a multimillion-dollar wholesale business selling gourmet products and ready-made meals.

“We knew if we wanted to take Pasta Vera to the next level, it was time for a change.”

Today, Christchurch-based Pasta Vera supplies restaurants, hotels and meal-kit delivery services across New Zealand with pesto’s, sauces and pasta products, including fresh fettuccine, frozen lasagne and a range of vegan, gluten-free and nut-free products.

“We’ve built our brand and business on using quality ingredients and creating high-quality products with the highest standards of food safety,” Linda says.

In 2017 one of their products was mislabeled and had to be recalled. Because the problem involved only a relatively small number of products sold to a few supermarkets, Pasta Vera could manually identify where the items had been sent and had them removed. But the incident persuaded them they needed a better way to quickly trace, isolate and correct any future safety issues or recalls.

“It’s a massive risk if you are in the food business and can’t pinpoint a batch,” Linda says. “We were very lucky it was only a labelling error. If this had been a product recall from a large production run, it would have been a horrendous loss. It could have destroyed our business.”

To safeguard their company, Phil and Linda knew they required an integrated business management system to provide greater quality control and traceability across their supply chain. They also wanted an integrated system because they knew it would help improve their inventory management and overall efficiency of their business which was growing at a rate of 20 percent a year.

“Like many New Zealand companies, we were very good at running our business on the smell of an oily rag,” Linda says. “But we knew if we wanted to take Pasta Vera to the next level, it was time for a change.”

The timing was right for other reasons. The company was about to move into a new, purpose-built 1000-square-metre facility, twice as big as their old factory. At the same time, the government was pushing through tougher food safety regulations, traceability obligations and recall requirements across the New Zealand food industry.

After reviewing their options, Phil and Linda chose Abel ERP not only to deliver traceability and quality control of their products, but also to integrate all their business processes and provide the flexibility to grow with a single system.

“If we have any issue now with a batch, we can find out in two minutes where it is and, if its been shipped, to whom. This is a significant improvement and our main reason for moving to Abel.”

“As someone with an accounting background I knew the pitfalls of buying off-the-shelf products,” Linda says. “It was essential for us to have Abel configured to match our own unique business processes. Abel’s implementation process is very good. Their Christchurch based ERP consultant came to our house, listened to our needs and came up with the right solutions very quickly.”

Pasta Vera’s new Abel system went live in October 2017, first providing the core tools and automation to manage the company’s quality control and traceability requirements. Abel replaced their manual labelling process with a system of bar-coded product labels, automatically printed with batch numbers and best-before dates. Prior to dispatch, the product labels are scanned in the packing room with a hand-held device, ensuring they can be easily tracked and traced to their delivery point.

“If we have any issue now with a batch, we can find out in two minutes where it is, whether its been shipped and to whom,” Linda says. “This is a significant improvement for our business and our main reason for moving to Abel. We are finding that Abel’s real-time visibility of our stock flows is driving better production scheduling and efficiency, it’s been extremely helpful and integral to our planning.”

Linda says Abel has driven other improvements as well. One was to replace manual timesheets with an automated process to track and calculate wage hours, and reconcile the hours charged to the products made. Another improvement was to integrate the factory shop’s point-of-sale system with the rest of the business, eliminating the need for a separate system.

“We are now starting to see the real benefits of Abel,” she says. “It’s such a full solution and we’re still finding useful features and functionality.”

Linda says these benefits include Abel’s integrated, real-time financials and flexible reporting tools that she can access at the office or overseas, whether she wants to analyze general ledger data or freight costs by customers and products.

“I like the agile way of Abel,” Linda says. “Some companies ask you to spec out your needs in long emails or stories, but you don’t know all the possibilities of a system until you start using it.”

“As our business changes and grows, we see new opportunities and different requirements. That’s what I like about Abel’s flexibility. When we think of an area we would like to improve, the functionality is most likely there and can be easily configured to meet our unique needs”.

With a new system to optimize and protect their business, and a new factory to accommodate their double-digit annual growth, Pasta Vera seems poised for continued success at the top of their food chain.

Source: This article was originally sourced from Abel Software