Exciting and challenging journey
How has the journey with IMI been until today?
– It has been exciting and challenging. When I became logistics manager at TOOLS, we had twenty warehouses spread all over Norway. Now they are reduced to five and we are closing another three before Christmas. This leaves the central warehouse at Rosenholm and a regional warehouse in Stavanger. Accurate reports and profitability analyzes give us better business control. FCM has streamlined our freight and transport operations and gives us tremendous control of what an item costs to transport from A to B. Shortly we will use the price calculator at our website. In this way, customers do not need to log into any external system to calculate freight costs, says Stig.
From invoice control to financial control
In addition to invoice control, IMI performs freight allocation and freight accruals with full automation.
– For us, it was crucial to gain control over our business processes. I came from a company that struggled with freight accruals. For six years before IMI, we had discussed what we could do to get better control of Month-end closing. We knew what we had shipped, but did not receive an invoice and did not know what we would have to pay. At TOOLS, we have gained control over the business processes and have a well-functioning freight accrual system in place, says Gustavsen. He is a trained analyst and has a penchant for dashboards and reports. – I no longer need to do deep dive into Excel sheets with more than 20,000 lines. IMI gives me an overview of everything. With their trend analysis, I get what I need on an overall level.
Improved management level business reporting
Many suppliers offer invoice control. – IMI’s strength is that they have a broader and better customer adapted solution which includes integrating our processes of invoice control, account coding, accrued liabilities, price calculation, profitability analysis, and more. As a result of the close cooperation, we have improved business reporting and control at management level. Every year we carry out millions of freight operations and by using the freight calculator our booking managers get increased control over the goods transportation,” says Stig.
Business processes must be structured
We have an unstructured carrier portfolio with over two hundred carriers we need to improve our internal processes and get our warehouses and stores to use FCM from IMI, says Gustavsen. He believes that IMI is extremely solutions-oriented when it comes to TOOLS internal challenges. They have a strong Business Intelligence solution at the bottom that means that we are always at the forefront of development.
Simplifies our business
Among other things, we have discussed profitability with the use of our own cars. We use everything from external carriers that drive TOOLS cars to small local partners who are responsible for daily small deliveries. The cost of using small partners is probably not economically justified, but this is the dilemma between sales and logistics. Sales is about delivering the goods on time. The faster the goods reach the customer, the more expensive the freight will be. With FCM from IMI we can pre-calculate the freight price so that we can reduce this with X percent.
A submersion into freight costs
We now implement BI reports so that we can thoroughly examine freight costs in relation to revenue. The goal is not to make money from freight but to charge correctly for transportation. It is extremely important for us to give accurate freight prices to our customers so that we are always competitive. We should not over-charge our customers but have control over how much we should invoice them. IMI is very helpful with this, Stig emphasizes.
