Hilton Haulage Transport is a NZ owned company providing transport and storage solutions to more than 2,000 customers, including national and multi-national food processors within the Canterbury region. Holding a significant market share for freight, containers and storage within the area, the company operates a 7-day, 24-hour service to meet customer demands - and dispatches 12,000 jobs a month on average.

In May 2002, Hilton Haulage adopted Microsoft Business Solutions-Solomon Financials, in conjunction with a Transport Dispatch System (TDS) developed by Solomon Software, to streamline the business and further improve their level of customer service. The combined TDS and Solomon solution, which integrates seamlessly, has automated the company's job dispatch process - saving time and money - while creating efficiencies within financial management and reporting.

Rapid company growth demands new technology

Hilton Haulage administration manager, Mark Woodward, explains that for the last four years, his company has experienced a significant annual growth rate and needed to automate its job dispatch process to efficiently cope with increasing customer demand. "Five years ago the company was significantly smaller than today," he says. "There was a surge of farming, agricultural and industrial activity in the local area and our market share grew in line with our customers. At the time, we had two to three staff responsible for manual job dispatch. Although this was an efficient process while we were a small company, it became more problematic once the volume of work increased."

Woodward says that the company's legacy accounting system was also not able to cope with the increased volume of business transactions.  "We were using a basic accounting package," he says, "and the reporting no longer delivered the depth we required.  We needed to separate the company into several trading divisions and we needed a multi-user system that could handle the finances for a number of departments."

Drives the business with an integrated TDS and Solomon Solution

Hilton Haulage spent more than three years looking for a technology solution that could seamlessly manage the company's job dispatch requirements through to its invoicing and profit and loss.  "We researched at least eight software packages and refined the search down to three local programmes," says Woodward.

"We finally made the decision to work with Solomon Software and adopted their Transport Dispatch System (TDS) together with the Microsoft Business Solutions-Solomon accounting solution they're supporting. The team at Solomon had a strong background in the transport industry as well as broad accounting and business experience. This gave us the confidence that they could support us for the long term. Both the TDS and Solomon products are flexible and straightforward to customise. The systems interface easily to share data and deliver a seamless experience to the organisation."

Solomon Software general manager Chris Main, says that the company's TDS solution, built using Microsoft Visual Basic, was developed specifically for the transport industry. "The system delivers job dispatch, tracking and reporting," he says, "and has been designed to interface with Microsoft Business Solutions-Solomon, delivering a total business solution to Hilton Haulage. The flexibility of the products' underlying architecture will also allow the company to easily add new functionality when required as the two systems are complementary."

Streamlining job dispatch processes while increasing financial efficiency

The combined solution went live in May 2002. Hilton Haulage are using TDS to generate and track all jobs (around 12,000 per month) in real time and deliver sales analysis and reporting. Once a job is complete, the information is seamlessly exported into Solomon, which automatically generates the invoice and manages the company's financials including Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable and General Ledger.

"The TDS system allows us to efficiently track all our jobs in real time," says Woodward. "We can see what's happening with our freight and vehicles and make timely decisions that ultimately benefit our customers." Woodward adds that the seamless integration of the TDS system with Solomon has been instrumental to streamlining the business. Solomon is delivering enhanced functionality to the Accounts Department and more in-depth reporting - providing valuable insight into the company's growth.

"Once a job is completed," says Woodward, "it automatically becomes a financial record within Solomon. It's a flexible accounting solution and the information the system delivers is very detailed. We can easily customise the month-end reports to accommodate the needs of different staff members. Solomon also has the capability to run multi-company reports, which will be an added benefit in the future."

A profit centric outlook

Solomon Software is also currently installing the Project Controller module within Solomon, which will allow Hilton Haulage to treat each of the company's vehicles as an ongoing project and more accurately assess costs. Staff will be able to see how much each vehicle is costing on a month-to-date, year-to-date and lifetime-to-date basis and assess profits for nominated time periods. 

Looking to the future, Woodward says the company will implement the Solomon Warehouse Management, Inventory and Purchasing modules and will also take advantage of both solutions to take parts of the business online. "Within the next one to two years, we plan to give customers the option of requesting and tracking jobs online and viewing account queries via the web. Both Solomon and TDS can interface with the web and we're confident that the systems will deliver the e-commerce functionality we need to remain competitive in the industry."

Microsoft Business Solutions Partner group Manager, David Guy, says that the experience of Hilton Haulage is just one example of the ease of integration between Microsoft Business Solutions applications and third party software. "Solomon provides organisations like Hilton Haulage strong financial functionality and is flexible enough to interface with other systems," he says, "enabling users to easily retrieve the business information they need."

For more information on Solomon and Microsoft Business Solutions, contact
Anne Frith
09 362 5865
askdynnz@microsoft.com
Microsoft New Zealand
PO Box 8070, Symonds Street, Auckland

June 2003

Free whitepapers on ERP
from Microsoft