HOYER Drives Down Costs with PROACTIS
Leading logistics company, HOYER, reduces its costs,
improves efficiencies and gains faster visibility of the cost
pipeline.
Profile
International transport group, HOYER, operates in 75 countries
and with more than 8,000 vehicles, it boasts the largest
independent tanker fleet in the world. HOYER manages logistics for
some of the world's leading brand names, which in the UK include
companies such as Scottish Courage, Esso Petroleum, ICI, Tate &
Lyle and BOC.
Challenge
In an industry where margins are continuously tightening and
many competitors are falling by the wayside, HOYER is always
seeking new ways to reduce its costs and improve efficiencies.
And for a company whose reputation is built on quality of
service and an impeccable safety record, this means that not only
customer facing procedures, but also internal administrative
procedures are under the spotlight.
Why PROACTIS?
The PROACTIS spend control solution was the first phase of a new
initiative to streamline internal procedures. Since going live,
PROACTIS has helped HOYER to reduce its administrative burden and
more importantly, improve the way it manages its finances and
controls its spend.
Greg McLeen is Finance Director at HOYER UK Ltd: "We wanted
to achieve much faster visibility of our cost pipeline than our
previous paper-based systems would allow, and we saw PROACTIS as a
way of streamlining those systems, as well as making the key
information available sooner."
"In particular, we wanted to move from batch and paper
systems to real-time systems. We wanted better management
information that would enable us to take management action much
earlier."
Results
PROACTIS is now used by staff to manage purchasing-related
tasks, not only speeding up what was previously a labour-intensive
and ill-defined process, but also imposing HOYER's own business
rules and spending limits.
Greg McLeen is now safe in the knowledge that staff can only
purchase within their given limits and from permitted suppliers,
and staff are happier because most of the administration is done
for them. For instance, purchase orders are automatically coded
correctly, suppliers are automatically sourced and commitment
information is instantly delivered to the Finance system
(CODA-Financials).
Greg continues: "Spend control is very important to HOYER.
We wanted to impose physical controls over spending on overheads
and PROACTIS' commitment accounting capabilities help us manage
budgets and avoid overspends. Because PROACTIS is linked into our
Accounting system, this takes place in real time and with complete
reliability."
"Our old systems were based on pieces of paper, so we
couldn't really get any useful management information. Now we can
analyse what we spend with different suppliers, who spends it and
on what. We have instant visibility of purchasing
transactions."
"Most importantly, PROACTIS has speeded up the production of
our monthly accounts and we can now understand the details behind
each of our cost numbers."
Tim Binns, IT Systems and Development Manager at HOYER UK Ltd,
is also a keen advocate of
PROACTIS, pointing out that the system addresses many problems
inherent to the old way of working: "In the past most staff
didn't even raise written purchase orders, they complained that
procedures took too long and got in their way. They were, of
course, unaware of the difficulty this gave us when analysing costs
or when dealing with suppliers' invoices."
The implementation of PROACTIS in the UK has been so successful
that HOYER has rolled it out to their other European operations,
including Scandinavia and Ireland.
