Followmont Transport
Followmont Transport is a privately-owned, highly successful Queensland business employing 450 employees. It’s now 25 years since the driving force behind Followmont, Alan Salpietro and Bernard Tobin, identified a niche market for the distribution and packaging of newspapers, brochures, magazines and other print media.Today, the two are still demonstrating their capacity for innovation in the way that Followmont is using IT to streamline its business processes and improve customer service.
THE CHALLENGE
Significant growth and a major push toward providing e-business solutions for its customers were the main reasons Followmont Transport decided to review its IT infrastructure.
A survey of its customer base had revealed 90% of Followmont’s 10,000 active customers wanted to interact with the company online. The functions requested included online statement delivery, the ability to lodge and track freight, and payment.
Meanwhile internal users had also indicated it was time for a change. The company’s IT division was receiving three to four complaints a day regarding the existing system’s poor performance, especially at peak times such as month end.
To satisfy both demands would clearly require a substantial investment. Followmont’s IT Manager, David Bissett, was tasked with overseeing the solution.
“Most companies don’t like spending a lot on IT, which is usually seen as necessary operating cost,” Bissett said. “We had to ensure that the new solution would provide return on investment, immediate customer service benefits and performance improvement for staff.”
The solution would also have to be future proof, in terms of being scalable to handle the company’s expected, continued growth.
The three key focuses of the project were therefore capacity planning, a network upgrade and, due to the on-line business environment, improved security.
“We had to make sure the infrastructure would be capable of supporting the anticipated increase in transaction volumes and reporting that the new system would bring,” he said. “As things stood, reports needed to be run out of business hours because otherwise they would just cripple the network.”
At each month’s end, the existing system strained under handling statements for 10,000 customers which meant printing 16,000.
“Month end was always a case of all hands on deck. The data entry staff typed faster than the server could process and our remote depots would be unable to access our corporate systems.
“There was always plenty of over-time available for anyone wanting to earn extra. The company is a good employer and it always paid for the overtime, but not everyone wants overtime and of course, it just wasn’t good business sense.”
Followmont’s IT services partner, Priority 1 Solutions, planned and implemented the new infrastructure - the hardware and local as well as wide area networks (LAN & WAN). They also upgraded the environments security system and guided the key success driver for the project - capacity planning.
Chief considerations taken into account included:
- An expected growth in Followmont’s client base from 10,000 to 12,000.
- The need to increase system performance for internal and external customers.
- The need to streamline data entry and improve Followmont’s reporting capabilities in order to identify financial savings.
The ‘front-end’ of Followmont’s e-business solution was achieved by upgrading their existing Omnix software to Omnix SmartMove 3.5. The software’s B2B and B2C capabilities would enable Followmont to streamline the input of its 25,000 consignments per week and deliver a host of other e-business functionality.
However, realising the software’s full benefits would depend on the design and capacity of the ‘back-end’. The hardware and network infrastructure must be capable of supporting the expected increase in user load and on-line transactions.
Hardware
One of Bissett’s first decisions concerned the infrastructure’s new hardware platform. After considering IBM as an option, he asked Priority 1 to recommend and price a Sun solution.
“We had a lot of confidence from dealing with Sun over a number of years and while we overstretched our last Sun’s capacity, it never let us down,” Bissett said. “Our relationship track record with Priority 1 was excellent. It’s as though they are an extension of our own IT department. I didn’t have that level of comfort with another vendor.”
In addition to this comfort factor, Bissett said that all of Followmont’s previous Sun upgrades had worked well.
“We were used to the Solaris operating system, so there were no unknowns and choosing Sun also meant we were able to reduce the service costs for the project. We had a clear level of comfort with both Priority 1 and the technology platform.”
The complete environment recommended and installed by Priority 1 included a Sun V890 server, external disk bay of 14 disks and a tape library. The supported network was upgraded to include HP switches and 70 Windows workstations across five regional sites and head office, with core business applications running on the Sun Solaris platform.
Three additional Sun servers - X4200, V60 and V210 - were also deployed for the environment’s Domain Controller, Check Point Firewall and Web Server.
Network
Priority 1 had previously recommended Followmont move to managed switches, but it was not until the e-business project that this was undertaken. They priced, planned and rolled out the upgraded internal network then supervised the connection of all Followmont’s remote sites to head office by Telstra.
“If it wasn’t for Priority 1’s persistence and negotiating capability, we’d probably still be waiting on the carrier to establish our wide area network,” Bissett said. “Priority 1 kept us informed and kept on their case, that was very important.”
Security
Once the infrastructure was in place, Priority 1 then installed Check Point to secure Followmont’s new corporate environment.
“Until this project, I don’t think Followmont fully appreciated its dependency on the integrity of its system. I personally relied heavily on Priority 1 to give us good, independent advice so that when they recommended Check Point for our firewall, I was happy to go with that decision.”
RESULTS
Bissett summed up the success of the upgrade project: “Before this rollout, IT was viewed by the business as nothing more than a necessary overhead. The interesting thing was that as our experience with technology increased, so did our profits. What we once saw as a cost is clearly a profit generator.”
Followmont is now using the Internet to provide file exchange with key customers and web access to track job progress. Key benefits to customers are the electronic processing of their consignments including printing, packing labels, manifest, run-sheets and online monitoring and proof of delivery.
“We’ve even invested in rolling out a fleet of PDAs to our drivers working with GPRS communication systems. We’re learning how to make the most of our return on IT investment,” he said.
Bissett uses a number of examples to illustrate the return on Followmont’s investment in its new IT infrastructure. In his words, these include:
- The new server has reduced the cost of labour per consignment note by 20 percent. That’s dramatic when you consider we have 100,000 consignment notes per month.
- Mailing costs with be reduced by $5,000 per month as customers move online.
- Overall savings per month will be between $8,000 and $10,000.
- Invoices are now issued on time. Previously they were anything up to two weeks late.
- Data entry staff can now leave work on time meaning we save large amounts of money previously spent on overtime wages.
- Customers are pleased to receive their statements on time and are happy with the new levels of reporting we can now produce.
- Our country depots are very happy as they can now access data that was previously unavailable because the old server would ‘time out’ before data could reach them.
- Before the new server went in, running a report meant that everyone throughout the organization had to stop working until it was completed.
- Now, running reports such as daily account postings, end of month and end of period financials, statement production and printing has been significantly reduced from 12 to just three hours.
The results are particularly impressive considering the new environment has been up and running for only three months.
Followmont has set itself a goal to move at least 25% of customers to full electronic transfer within the first 12 months.
“We don’t expect to ever have all our customers use electronic transfer, some are just too small and will always want to use paper and we’ll support them in that,” Bissett said.
“But even if we do reach 100 percent, the capacity and infrastructure we now have in place means we’re ready and capable to meet even that demand.”