CJD unlocks new growth opportunities with Infor CloudSuite Equipment
See how CJD found a data solution that could address every aspect of its business
Founded in 1974, CJD Equipment is a privately-owned Australian company whose core business involves the national distribution of construction equipment and trucks. The CJD product portfolio comprises world-class brands such as Volvo, SDLG, Kenworth, DAF, Isuzu, and Fuso. CJD’s network of branches and dealers stretches across the nation, from Australian state capitals to regional country towns, and mining centers.
Partnering with international manufacturers allows the company to offer a diverse range of quality products that support a variety of industries—from heavy-duty equipment used in construction to trucks for road freight, haulage, and general delivery.
Their commitment to customer support is paramount and like all successful businesses, they rely heavily on their people and systems to ensure that commitment is realized.
Finding the right cloud solution
To continue its growth plans and stay competitive in today’s demanding equipment industry, CJD needed to modernize its business processes and systems. Under its previous on-premises solutions, CJD found that many of its applications had reached a point where they could not be updated further. This made it difficult for them to adopt modern business practices like continuous updates, centralized data, and visibility that would make it easier to track its complex part histories.
In addition, CJD required a solution that could address every aspect of its business. While its previous solution worked exceptionally well for parts and services, it was a less robust solution for handling machines and trucks—which were managed using manual solutions like Excel spreadsheets. A cloud-based solution would provide the integration capabilities to maintain clarity and efficiency throughout its processes, with the extensibility to handle future challenges.
All of these features needed to be as intuitive as possible in order to garner employee adoption quickly and easily. Brad Fowler, Executive General Manager - Operations & Business Development at CJD, explains: “In many ways, our real key metric was to give our staff enough familiarity with the new products that they could continue their processes seamlessly without changing anything on the customer’s end to get there.”
When we find future opportunities, we won't be concerned with whether or not the system will cope.
Executive General Manager - Operations & Business Development
Modernising systems with minimal process disruption
“One of the issues that we that we had with the migration was a huge volume of data,” explains Fowler. With nearly 200,000 item numbers across 21 warehouses and a wealth of transactions being recorded on a month-to-month basis, their database builds up exceptionally quickly.
CJD took the opportunity to cleanse and optimise its data as part of the cloud migration preparation and reached a point where it was ready to launch to the cloud.
“Our goal, which we ended up achieving, was to shut our business on Friday afternoon on version 10.1 and open again on Monday in the cloud,” says Fowler.
Challenges
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The existing on-premises solution couldn't scale to support CJD’s growing business
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Siloed data meant different parts of the business were managed with disparate systems
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Systems needed to be modernised with minimal disruption to business processes
Business results
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A system that can scale to meet growth in usage as well as growth in demand
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Easy maintenance, upgrades and extensibility in the cloud
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Ability to set up a new branch within a couple of days