Website: https://www.daviesturner.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/daviesturner/
In operation since 1870, Davies Turner has become recognised as one of the UK’s leading multimodal forwarders and logistics operations. Their capabilities span air, sea, road and rail and they provide specialist services across a wide range of industries including Aquatics, Fashion & Retail, Fine Wines, and Pharmaceuticals – to name but a few.
Today, Davies Turner employs over 900 people and operates out of 22 locations (with another under development) and has a warehouse capacity of more than 150,000 square metres (over 1.6 million square feet).
Davies Turner pride themselves on being able to meet the unique needs of every one of their customers. They not only provide services to some of the most specialist sectors, but always look to cater for the specific nuances and requirements of each individual customer.
Having the technology in place to enable them to do this efficiently and effectively is key. Which is why they first deployed Blue Yonder (formerly JDA and previously RedPrairie) Dispatcher WMS some twenty years ago. It offered them the breadth of functionality to manage such a broad range of customer requirements, while also offering them the flexibility and ease of use to quickly onboard new clients with a range of unique requirements, processes and SLAs.
In their quest to continue to look for ways to provide their customers with value-adding services and innovative ways to streamline processes and operation, Davies Turner started to look for a way to give their customers digital access into their operation.
They wanted to offer the ability to gain real-time visibility on stock levels, to place orders from the field, and to gain access to a wealth of key management information and reporting.
And the solution needed to be something that specifically met the needs of their customers – who were looking for a simplified, intuitive-to-use, sub-set of functionalities.
Socius24 had worked with Davies Turner for many years, providing BY Dispatcher WMS health check service to ensure optimal usage, providing Oracle up-graded software and assisting in the upgrade of their version of Blue Yonder (BY) Dispatcher WMS.
So, when they needed to give their customers simple, supplementary access to WMS information, Davies Turner turned to Socius24 for help. They were confident that Socius24 understood their unique business and knew that their expertise in BY Dispatcher WMS was second to none.
Since the initial installation of Davies Turner’s WMS, Socius24 had developed a bolt-on to BY Dispatcher WMS, their User Service Portal (USP). This system not only provided an intuitive web-based interface into the WMS, but also provided some additional functionality that Davies Turner knew would be invaluable to their customers
Over the years, User Services Portal has grown in scope – partly in response to requests from customers. As Darren says “We put in a couple of requests for changes, just minor things, but they were picked up and implemented very quickly. Which is something we don’t really see with any other provider – them taking on board feedback and then actually implementing changes, so we were very happy with the outcome. It’s very good, very reliable, very robust.”
There have been many customer benefits of installing USP, not least that since the Pandemic, many customers’ staff are more remote than they used to be.
Being able to offer their customers USP means that Davies Turner can save a significant amount of time and energy in onboarding.
But it’s not only during onboarding that USP saves Davies Turner time and money: “If we didn’t have User Services Portal, we would be inundated with requests from our customers, which would bump up our customer service overheads.”
One of the aspects of Dispatcher WMS that Davies Turner find particularly useful is the reporting that’s available. “We do all reporting ourselves, internally, from Dispatcher. There’s lots of data available, and we can access it in many different ways. It’s very good, very easy to work with.”
By extending the capabilities of BY Dispatcher WMS with The User Service Portal from Socius24, Davies Turner has gained some significant benefits:
The combination of BY Dispatcher WMS and Socius24 User Service Portal, and the ease at which it can be configured, means that Davies Turner are able to meet the needs of any customer regardless of the specialist requirements of that sector or the particular SLAs for that customer.
The BY Dispatcher WMS enables Davies Turner to quickly onboard new customers into the system and configure processes against contractual commitments. Using Socius24 User Service Portal as the interface for these customers dramatically reduces training time required for each customer.
Since introducing the User Service Portal, Davies Turner has seen a significant take-up by customers and real recognition of the value that it has delivered, in particular the ability for customers to see real-time inventory records and for them to be able to place online orders themselves.
Through providing such an intuitive way for customers to serve themselves around access to information and placing orders. This has not only streamlined processes but has also reduced the burden on the administrative teams in Davies Turner.
Well, they should use Dispatcher because it’s configurable and you don’t actually need to be a technical expert to configure it. And that’s a huge benefit for us, because we like to do everything ourselves.
“And with USP, people should install it because it’s user friendly and compatible with pretty much anything.
With Socius24, we always keep a number of hours in the bank to be used as and when needed. Because for things like having health checks, help with the upgrade and help with general troubleshooting problem solving, it is invaluable.
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