Bunzl Safety, a subsidiary of Bunzl Australasia, offers workwear, footwear, personal protective equipment (PPE), lifting and materials handling equipment, height safety systems and technical services. With more than 60 years in the business, Bunzl Safety is a well-respected brand servicing Australian organisations in a wide range of sectors including manufacturing, mining, energy, heavy industrial, building and construction, healthcare, food processing, government and defence.
As well as providing an array of personal protective gear and onsite materials, Bunzl also offers a selection of technical services that extends the business’s safety offering to deliver a complete, whole-of-site safety solution. It offers a range of options for businesses to confirm the safety of their sites, including equipment testing and servicing, site safety assessments and hands-on education courses to ensure that all staff are proficient in on-site safety.
Bunzl Safety was acquired from Jeminex and had three separate companies which provided workwear, safety equipment, lifting and rigging products. All these three businesses were independent users of Pronto Xi business management solutions – leaving Bunzl Safety with the arduous task of running three distinct systems. This, combined with differing business rules and processes across the three divisions, created inefficiency, higher costs – and most importantly limited visibility for management about overall operations.
Bunzl Safety decided to undertake an end-to-end consolidation to align processes, aggregate data and transition the business onto one common platform.
“When the early planning for the project was underway, the company evaluated other systems,” says Carolyn Grice, Business Systems Manager at Bunzl Safety. “Ultimately our staff preferred the Pronto Xi environment and based on their previous experience, they were confident that the Pronto Software team had the necessary expertise to guide them through the complex task of aligning business processes and data.
“Also, in terms of training and getting people up to speed, Pronto Xi is easy and intuitive. It didn’t require a lot of time for new users to become confident, and that was an important factor in deciding to stay with Pronto.”
A strong technology partner makes change easier
The first subsidiary company began using the latest version of Pronto Xi within 18 months of the deployment decision – and the two remaining subsidiary companies were aligned on Pronto Xi four months later.
“Pronto Software was involved in the process the whole way through,” explains Grice. “We did an enormous amount of work to merge all the data into a single database and implement common business processes. The main challenge was linked to Bunzl staff changes during the course of the project.”
The completion of the consolidation project also marked a new phase for the organisation.
“Bunzl Safety is now in a position to undertake further acquisitions and to grow our business,” Grice adds. “We couldn’t have done that without a common ERP system that enabled consolidation and clarity – and without the assistance of the Pronto Software team at every key step along our journey.”
Gearing up a business to work
With its consolidated ERP solution, Bunzl Safety was able to seamlessly manage its safety equipment inventory across all business units. Pronto Xi gave the Bunzl Safety team the visibility they needed to ensure they always had stock to fulfil customer orders at anytime, anywhere. As well as being able to easily confirm where stock was, and how much was to-hand, Pronto Xi also delivers valuable insights about product suppliers and vendors to aid the procurement and ordering process.
Bunzl Safety has 230 Pronto Xi users spanning its back-office functions, warehouse and 50-strong field sales force – many of which often work in rural and remote areas.
“The Bunzl Safety sales team are probably one of our biggest beneficiaries,” says Grice. “They are now able to access the Pronto Xi CRM system to look up the status of orders, update customer notes and review latest activities, even when they are working remotely. This greatly enhances their credibility and enables quicker decision making.”
The customer service teams are also heavy Pronto Xi users. When responding to a sales enquiry, they are now able to enter the query into Pronto Xi CRM for follow-up and the activity is automatically registered and even available within Microsoft Outlook.
“Customer service is critical to us and Pronto Xi ensures the information we need to respond to requests is available – increasing the speed at which resolution is achieved,” adds Grice.
Third-party integrations fit like a glove
Bunzl Safety uses a number of third-party Pronto Xi integrations and aims to automate as many processes as possible.
“Our customers can now enter their orders into the Pronto Xi Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) system and it is automatically synchronised with Pronto Xi for processing and dispatch,” Grice explains. “This is a big win in terms of efficiency and speeds up our response rate. This is critical as many of our customers have staff working in high-risk situations and without the right equipment the job will stop.”
Dispatch is another key integration for the Bunzl Safety team. When an order is entered into Pronto Xi, it will query the freight system to find the best carrier for the order to its destination. The order is then processed and sent using the most appropriate freight company for its final delivery.
Bunzl Australasia, the parent company of Bunzl Safety Australia, also has its own business intelligence tool, which is integrated into Pronto Xi for reporting and planning purposes. This allows both entities to generate reports on stock, profit and loss, as well as comparative sales.
Finding safety in a hosted cloud solution
Bunzl Safety chose Pronto Cloud to host a range of applications, including Pronto Xi.
“We reviewed a number of hosting schemes but decided on Pronto Cloud because of its price-competitiveness, as well as its unsurpassed Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) solution,” says Grice.
Reliable business continuance is a major requirement for Bunzl Safety, which tests its systems regularly to make sure that if there is an outage, restoration is quick and seamless.
“Pronto Software offers us a great service – and their support team is excellent. Based on this, we recently made the decision to move all our other servers onto Pronto Cloud’s facility,” says Grice. “The Pronto Xi ERP system has created an efficient platform to enable continued profitable growth and the capacity to take on any future acquisition opportunities. For Bunzl Safety, our relationship with Pronto Software is built on the trust that when we need them, Pronto Software will be there to listen and support us as best they can.”
Safety is what Bunzl Safety does. It understands that quality safety equipment not only provides businesses with confidence to operate throughout their day but also offers a higher level of physical comfort resulting in optimised performance. By leveraging Pronto Software’s consolidated and streamlined ERP solution, Bunzl Safety has been able to deliver on its mission to bring head to toe safety to its customers in a cost-effective and efficient manner.