Streamlined service boosts economic growth

Kotahi are a joint venture between Fonterra and Silver Fern Farms managing a significant share of New Zealand’s containerised freight, connecting the nation to the world.

The Challenge

Logistics is a complex business with containers of all sizes types and qualities travelling between hundreds of locations worldwide into and out of New Zealand.

Kotahi were established with world-class optimisation and operations processes, which has enabled them to manage a high volume of demand very efficiently. However, broadening their service offerings has required the company to introduce manual processes. The company needed a more efficient way to operate to capitalise on opportunities and improve quality of service. The company needed a comprehensive single view of their customers so they could engage with them, and partner vendors,  in a more streamlined way. 

The Datacom Difference

We approached Kotahi’s challenges completely objectively and ran several workshops to help us understand the issues and potential opportunities. We then conducted a fit/gap analysis against the two leading customer relationship management (CRM) platforms – Salesforce.com and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. This helped us to identify which platform would meet Kotahi’s requirements with the lowest total cost of ownership, not only from a licensing perspective but also the consulting effort based on functional fit and support. We recommended Salesforce.com – Sales, Service and Community Clouds as the best solution.

The first phase of the Salesforce.com implementation was to move away from the large and complicated  manual processes that were used for customer profiles and to create a single view of the customer. 
These views held information ranging from customers’ shipping requirements, agreed KPIs and special requirements, right through to shipping forecasts.

The second phase was creating the foundations for the vendor profile covering services that partner vendors could provide to Kotahi’s end customers. Future phases will allow us to to align what the customer wants with vendors that can provide those services at the best rates. Also included in the second phase are customer service and case management systems which will track complaints, issues, requests, feedback and success stories. Additionally Kotahi will use Salesforce’s Community Cloud to provide an integrated customer portal which will enable Omni-channel customers service and real-time information on orders.

Phase three involves adding the ‘bells and whistles’ and drilling down into what we can do in Salesforce to streamline the way Kotahi work. For example, automating standard detailed tasks that are required regularly to improve efficiency and prevent issues, and, if they do arise, reduce the time it takes to resolve them. 

Major benefits include improved visibility and collaboration within teams, across different business units 
and directly up to management. Salesforce provides a comprehensive single source of information and 
a clear process so customers experience a standardised, efficient and professional experience when they 
deal with Kotahi.