Background
Livestock Supplies NZ LTD (Livestock Supplies) is a privately owned business based in Gore, New Zealand. The company was founded in 1985 and aims to promote profitable and sustainable farming along with healthy stock and crops resulting from carefully targeted use of major nutrients and trace elements.
Andrew Collie, General manager for Livestock Supplies commented on the company saying “We import, wholesale and retail a wide variety of trace element and fertilisers. For paddock applications and soluble blends, we produce soluble dairy cow minerals, salt blocks, and everything in between.”
Livestock Supplies offer a wide variety of products and services and with this comes a huge need for a management system that can help oversee all these different areas.
Livestock Supplies initially implemented Advanced Business Manager (ABM) in 2011 and have continued to develop overall product use throughout the years, now heavily using Advanced Manufacturing System (AMS) and ABM Billfeeds to streamline their business processes and speed up invoicing.
Finding a solution that could take care of all of the aspects of their business was difficult. Andrew felt this was a huge challenge that ABM overcame, stating “ABM is super flexible which means we don’t have to run 5 different systems we can just run ABM and it takes care of everything”.
As Livestock Supplies grew, they began to notice how they were processing invoices and managing inventory wasn’t efficient and as they were in the process of a server upgrade they decided to “look at how they could better report on data and keep track of things.”
With a large number of staff and different roles within the company, Andrew can ensure his staff only see what they need to so no one gets overwhelmed with information that is not relevant “I have my screen looking how I want it and others can have theirs looking how they want it so they can do their job. Sales reps only see what they need to see, so they aren’t wasting time or getting confused.”
Andrew was impressed with the customisability and flexibility of ABM saying “ABM has the ability to be manipulated, the restrictions were minimal so we could adjust and change the invoice how we saw fit.”
Record keeping improved significantly through the use of the Billfeeds module, with Andrew stating “Using Billfeeds to produce the documentation and store invoices meant our record keeping was vastly improved.” Not only has Billfeeds improved the storage of records but it has helped Andrew and his team save a huge amount of time on their invoicing processes. Andrew believes it “saves us about 10 days a month, which is a huge saving.”
Using AMS has improved their inventory control, documentation and invoicing. Andrew commented on this saying “using manufacturing to actively pull stock, put into a bill of materials, then produce the documentation has vastly improved our record keeping.”
Integrating Advanced Business Manager into their business with the help of their Local ABM Support Partner, Jill Stewart from Strategic Software was “extremely easy and while a lot of staff were skeptical at the beginning they can really see the benefits ABM adds to the business.”
Livestock Supplies are happy to be using ABM throughout their business. Andrew is impressed with the results, commenting “It’s simple, surprisingly easy to use, transparent and you only need to have one screen up to do everything for you whole business, it’s fantastic.”
