News Stories
The birth of Smartspeed
18 June 2008 16:51
Company Profile
A project that Giles Johnston worked on prior to his establishing Smartspeed but which helped him in its creation, demonstrated the benefits of IT to businesses.
Several years ago Giles was working for the Agility Group on a project called North Transport Planning. It was during this time that Godfrey Syrett Ltd, a manufacturer and supplier of office equipment and furniture, asked for his help.
Stuart McCourt, 32, is Logistics Manager at the company’s new plant in Spennymoor, County Durham. On a typically busy afternoon, he explained to me how an IT system introduced by Giles firstly helped the company solve a problem and secondly, opened Stuart’s eyes to the potential of using IT in his job.
Stuart was then Operations Manager at the head office in Killingworth, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. “My job was to prepare and send orders to our factory at Langley Moor, County Durham, for dispatch,” he explains.
“The business was expanding and our systems were straining to cope. So I asked for Giles’ help. He spent time soaking in the atmosphere, asking questions, looking around and quickly focused on the area that needed the most improvement – our order and dispatch systems.
“We deliver to all over the country, which is divided it into around 20 sectors. Each of these contains all the postcodes for that area. My job was to manually go through the files, finding the postcodes, writing up the load plans and getting them to the drivers. It was a labour intensive procedure and involved a lot of paperwork.
“Furthermore, I was the only one who could do these load plans so whenever I was on holiday or say if I was sick or something, then it caused all sorts of problems and impacted our business efficiency.
“As you can imagine, it was a very time consuming process. I had to work ridiculous overtime to get the orders done. And the more people who were involved, the more paperwork, the more links in the chain that could go wrong. Not good for the stress levels!
“People are great but when it comes to admin systems like this, IT is a godsend, as I found out.
“Giles spent several sessions with us and his solution to our problem was a script of formula, which he wrote for an Excel spreadsheet. He also produced a user guide with screen shots and gave me a crash course in how to use the software!
“The Excel spreadsheet pulls out all the district numbers and post codes needed for our drivers. So instead of having to use a cumbersome paper based system we could now do it all at the push of a button. The order form could then, also at the touch of a button, be attached to a postcode and a loading sheet sent to a driver.
“I cannot describe to you the beneficial impact this had on my job. Before, it would take twelve hours to get orders prepared. Now it only took three or four. This freed me to concentrate on other things. The end result was that we could now maintain another £10m worth of orders.
“What Giles put in place is very good. We just had to tweak it. It just slotted in.
“And it helped us set a course for our company, for the future.”