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.
At a glance
Headquarters
Guildford, Western AustraliaIndustry
Employees
500
Product
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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.”
Modernizing 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 optimize 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
Business results
CloudSuite Equipment: A solution for the future
After completing its migration to CloudSuite Equipment, CJD now has a system that can scale to meet growth in usage as well as growth in demand.
“If we get another 50,000 parts to track, we can just push them into the system and not have any concerns about whether it will work.” In addition, the new system in the cloud helps CJD save money that may have otherwise been spent on server maintenance and upkeep. “We would have needed to purchase two new servers to keep maintaining on-premise,” Fowler says. “So there are definitely cost savings associated with not having to go and buy new infrastructure for that.”
In addition, after successfully moving to the cloud and Infor CloudSuite Equipment, CJD participated in an early adopter program using a new user experience tool called M3 Experience Designer. Embedded within M3 ERP, the tool allows customers to build and customize applications based on specific requirements. Using the tool, the CJD team was able to quickly build apps for their internal teams to help personalize and streamline the overall user experience within the ERP. By tailoring their team’s user experience, it helped reduce the complexity of business processes and provided seamless access to relevant business information right at their fingertips.
With the efficiency it unlocks via easy maintenance, upgrades, and extensibility in the cloud, CJD is free to explore new tech projects without worrying about whether its primary systems are operating effectively.
“Our pursuit of new projects will be never-ending,” says Fowler. “And that’s the advantage of the cloud: it can be never-ending.”