PORTALINK CAST STUDY
KINCROME
THE CHALLENGE
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Kincrome is a warehouse and distribution business that has been supplying to Automative, Industrial and Hardware markets for 30 years.
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Kincrome has four warehouse/distribution centres, which are strategically located throughout Australia, to deliver responsive and accurate order dispatches to all target markets.
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Fast and accurate order-to-shipment cycles are an imperative component of Kincrome’s customer value proposition.
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Kincrome invests in technology solutions that can enhance its order accuracy and improve the speed of its turnaround time.
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Finding a solution to meet Kincrome’s needs that was robust, accurate, quick and cost-effective proved challenging.
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PORTALINK CAST STUDY
KINCROME
THE CHALLENGE
-
Kincrome is a warehouse and distribution business that has been supplying to Automative, Industrial and Hardware markets for 30 years.
-
Kincrome has four warehouse/distribution centres, which are strategically located throughout Australia, to deliver responsive and accurate order dispatches to all target markets.
-
Fast and accurate order-to-shipment cycles are an imperative component of Kincrome’s customer value proposition.
-
Kincrome invests in technology solutions that can enhance its order accuracy and improve the speed of its turnaround time.
-
Finding a solution to meet Kincrome’s needs that was robust, accurate, quick and cost-effective proved challenging.
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the BACKGROUND
Ampol is Australia's leader in transport fuels, supplying one-third of the nation's transport fuel needs. The company has been providing a safe and reliable supply of high-quality fuels in Australia for over 100 years, servicing a customer base that spreads across a diverse range of fields, including retail, mining, agriculture, aviation, transport, small-to-medium enterprises, marine, automotive and government.
ERP Database: SAP
the CHALLENGE
Ampol's National Order Centre faced many challenges processing volumes of Customer Purchase Orders quickly enough to meet critical deadlines and same-day turnarounds. A large percentage of orders contain errors, such as incorrect product codes, and duplicate orders could slip through. Orders needed to be split between lubricants and fuel which are supplied out of different distribution facilities. The Customer Service Team referred to CRM notes when manually entering orders to ensure the correct delivery instructions were observed. Ampol also had to log in to some Customer web portals to locate and download new orders which would be manually entered into their ERP. With over 1900 sites across the country, Ampol started looking for a system that could digitise their non-EDI customer orders without compromising their established workflow processes and complex business rules.
The National Order Centre faces many challenges every day. Managing orders with timelines and errors became really difficult.
Tahlia Ford | Senior Customer Solutions Agent
Ampol
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the SOLUTION
Ampol selected Portalink because it had the flexibility needed to meet their specific needs and because it was more accurate than other systems that relied solely on OCR. Portalink implemented special functionality to automatically split and forward orders that contained both fuels and lubricants to the correct distribution facility, and Portalink was able to present the CRM notes with every order for the immediate attention of the Customer Service Rep. Duplicates and errors were eliminated and the volume of orders could be processed three times more quickly. Portalink automated the process of retrieving purchase orders from customer portals, extracting the data and exporting the order to the ERP, eliminating manual handling and saving considerable time. Portalink also helped Ampol to communicate more effectively with auto-email responses tailored to their needs.
Portalink is really good at picking up discrepancies, allowing us to only have to focus on the lines that need our attention. Customers that send good quality orders where there’s no issues or errors can be processed without anyone even having to touch it. [Auto-Export] saves us time and effort, even the 30 seconds that we would normally take on a Portalink order, it just goes straight through – no need to worry.
Tahlia Ford | Senior Customer Solutions Agent
Ampol
Any time that you can save allows you to be more thorough chasing up other things, so anytime saved throughout the day is a real benefit.
Stefan Perez | Customer Service Rep
Ampol
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the OUTCOME
Ampol has an ongoing commitment to achieve maximum efficiency gains and customer service quality. The Ampol Customer Service team enjoy using Portalink and find it an easy and intuitive system to learn. Portalink has helped Ampol achieve their customer service quality goals and efficiency gains.
The system didn’t take long to learn. The Inbox of our old system was very clunky and we needed to go back into different systems to check the order, but I found with Portalink that it’s all very streamlined. There’s less jumping about and the orders are much quicker.
Stefan Perez | Customer Service Rep
Ampol
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Orders that used to take 6 to 7 minutes to process are now being processed in 30 seconds by Portalink. Portalink is helping us improve our Customer Service and achieve our SLA for a 24 hour turnaround
Rameil Betyousef | Customer Solutions Manager
Ampol
the PORTALINK™ EFFECT
Portalink is integrated with Ampol's SAP database to receive and send secure digital files. Portalink automates the long tail of non-EDI transactions more accurately and seamlessly than traditional OCR systems - reducing manual data entry by more than 70%, eliminating errors and freeing up resources for higher reward customer service activities.
Click the images below to view comments and feature highlights from the Ampol team:
We receive so many orders every single day from a number of systems and the fact that we can ensure that orders placed through Portalink are going to be on time, we don’t have to worry about the customer emailing or calling us trying to find out where their order is because, it’s been processed, it took us 15 seconds, and the customer is good to go!
Tahlia Ford | Senior Customer Solutions Agent
Ampol