Border Express recognised the FourPL team for our deep industry experience and understanding of their business.
“FourPL conducted a thorough review of our systems, delivered a viable strategy and presented a robust business case to the board.”
Stephen Hogg, CFO, Border Express
BACKGROUND
Border Express is a national transport and distribution services company and a third generation family business with a team of over 1,000 and a number of national and state awards for safety, operations and training. Border Express competes alongside the biggest transport companies in Australia and has consistently increased their market share.
Border Express is committed to continued investment in their people, infrastructure and technologies to deliver value and innovation to customers and set benchmarks within their industry. As part of this commitment, Border Express embarked on a technology transformation program to improve efficiency across the Border Express network and engage deeper with customers to deliver industry leading service and value.
THE PROJECT
The Border Express business is undergoing significant transformation as the express delivery market changes and the company’s solution offer changes to support this market. Border Express identified that their existing systems needed stronger capabilities, integration and automation to support the projected consignment volumes, changes in technology and an enhanced customer experience. In addition, the core transport business system has reached technical constraints that restrict its ability to be extended to meet the forecasted needs.
Based on our extensive transportation industry experience and our willingness to look beyond the initial project scope to add value, FourPL were engaged to develop an enterprise systems strategy supported by a technology transformation business case to replace the current systems with an integrated solution.
OUR APPROACH
SYSTEMS STRATEGY
The FourPL team commenced with a deep dive into the existing systems within Border Express. The project scope involved assessing the current state and determining the future needs across all systems. In addition to this extensive scope, the project required completion in seven weeks including presentation of the proposed business case to the Border Express board.
Our team understood that Border Express is a family owned business and our approach involved engaging stakeholders across the business outside usual departmental boundaries and ensuring our team took the time to understand and respect the company structure.
Utilising the FourPL Strategy Development Approach as outlined in the diagram below, the FourPL team identified these key requirements to be met and presented these findings to the divisional teams, executives and board of Border Express:
- Remove the technical constraints of the incumbent systems
- Provide an integrated systems environment
- Ensure end to end data integrity
- Provide internal and external visibility of consignments in the network
- Provide visibility of costs in the business
- Create a platform to support the business vision
- Provide a platform for efficiency through machine directed tasks
- Provide a rich customer experience
- Enhance agility to adapt to disruptive technology
FOURPL STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT APPROACH
The next step was to determine the best systems and implementation approach to achieve these objectives and deliver industry leading system capabilities across Border Express’s customer service, finance, partner and operations business units. As part of this process we identified a number of innovative tools that could be introduced to add value to the Border Express operation and these ideas were well received by the Border Express team.
BUSINESS CASE
The business case prepared accounted for the software, hardware, external services, and internal costs to implement and run the recommended changes for a period of five years. This change program will create a systems platform to meet the current business vision and establish a platform for future growth.
PROJECT OUTCOMES
Proposed outcomes of the project:
- Provide a platform for future growth and create a compelling offer for Border Express customers
- Reduce revenue leakage (activity based billing, reduction in errors and availability of reconciliation information)
- Reduce costs in operations (improve productivity through analytics, operational visibility, planning tools)
- Reduce external costs in procurement
- Provide evidence based decision making (better decisions with better, timely information)
- Delay capital outlay (latent capacity in branches/fleet exposed through productivity improvements)
- Increase revenue through customer acquisition, customer retention and enabling new product offerings.
WHY FOURPL?
- The successful completion of a commercially sound enterprise systems strategy that was aligned to the client’s overall corporate strategy.
- The ability to deliver an enterprise systems strategy and evidence based business case to an aggressive timeline to meet the Border Express board schedule.
- Provision of significant additional value outside the project scope.
- Presentation of all findings to divisional teams, the executives and the board.
- Extensive transportation industry experience in similar projects.
FourPL contact for more information:
Anthony Hawkins – Chief Strategy Officer, FourPL
Anthony.Hawkins@fourpl.com.au
+61 411 476 999