Freight forwarding and logistics specialist Davies Turner transforms customer service with RPA. Automated inventory and order tracking provides customers with on-demand insights into stock and shipments, and helps teams work more efficiently—allowing the company to handle increasing business volumes without expanding staff.
The Challenge
As one of the UK’s leading multi-modal freight forwarding and logistics companies, Davies Turner plays a vital role in helping companies to move parts and products around the world quickly, reliably, and cost-effectively.
With many of its customers operating on tight timelines—where even small delays or discrepancies could have costly consequences—it is vital for Davies Turner to have a clear view of shipments and inventory at all times. But with global supply chains growing more and more complex, encompassing many different carriers and touch points, gaining this insight can be a challenge.
“We have thousands of shipments coming in and out of our facilities every day ,and if a customer contacts us to ask where a particular order is and what state it’s in, we need to give them that information fast,” said Darren Gurney, Logistics Systems Manager. “Failing to do so could lead to dissatisfied customers, and increase the risk of losing future business to a competitor.”
In the past, order tracking was a reactive and manual process at Davies Turner. When the company received a customer query about an order, teams would have to visit the relevant carrier’s website and search their tracking systems for more information about the shipment. If a team member was unable to find this information online, they would have to contact the carrier by phone or email, incurring further delays. On average, it took around 10 to 15 minutes to respond to order tracking requests.
“We always managed to stay on top of customer queries and meet our service level agreements [SLAs], but we knew that we could do better,” Gurney said. “We wanted to be more proactive, and provide all customers with up-to-the-minute insight into their orders instead of waiting until they came to us with a query.”
The Solution
Davies Turner sought a faster, simpler way to gain visibility into the thousands of orders it manages daily—tracking shipments in real time as they progress through each stage of the supply chain. The company implemented a robust RPA (Robotic Process Automation) solution, a powerful platform that enables quick and easy access to data from various sources. These sources include internal logistics and warehouse management systems, as well as external carrier tracking systems and third-party websites. Using RPA, Davies Turner has developed automated process flows that perform numerous data extraction and integration tasks, providing the company with alternative communication methods for engaging with customers.
“To date, we’ve deployed close to 100 RPA bots,” Gurney noted. “We have found the solution to be incredibly user-friendly—you don’t need to be a developer to make use of it. At the same time, RPA is very powerful; the things it can do seem almost limitless. We are using the solution to integrate data from our own systems, partner systems and third-party websites, and there really doesn’t seem to be anything that the solution provided by KeyMark can’t integrate with!”
Today, Davies Turner uses RPA to automatically capture reference and tracking numbers assigned to each order as it is entered into the company’s warehouse management system (WMS). The solution regularly queries carrier tracking systems and websites to retrieve delivery status and proof of delivery information, and links this data to the original order record in the WMS.
When an order leaves the company’s warehouse, Davies Turner sends an email to the client notifying them that their goods have left, listing the order details and providing a link where the client can track the order in real time. And if a customer gets in touch to ask about the status of his or her order, the operations team simply has to bring up the order record in the WMS, rather than visiting a website or contacting a carrier.
Davies Turner has also created an inventory tracking process that regularly checks stock levels in the company’s warehouse and automatically notifies customers via email to let them know when one of their inventory lines goes out of stock. This allows customers to take prompt action to replenish inventory levels, ensuring they can fulfil orders with minimum delay and avoid costly out-of-stock situations.
The Results
Streamlined order and inventory tracking is helping Davies Turner to deliver better service in the First Mile™ of customer interaction—providing customers with newfound insight into their stock and shipments, and empowering operations teams with lightning-fast access to the information they need to respond faster to customer queries.
“RPA helps us deliver much faster and responsive service to customers. While in the past, it could take our teams around 15 minutes to respond to a request for information on a shipment, today they can answer in real time,” Gurney said.
“With RPA, not only are we meeting customer’s expectations, we are exceeding them in certain areas. Normally a customer wouldn’t expect us to track all of their orders in real time, but thanks to RPA we now have this capability, increasing the number of shipments we track by 1000% without adding staff.”
More automated processes make life easier for teams at Davies Turner, as Gurney explained: “RPA has eliminated tedious manual work and has made people’s jobs easier—and all without introducing any major changes to the way teams work. People can now find the data they need a much quicker and slicker way, and it is helping us deliver a higher level of customer service with less administrative effort.”
Crucially, the increased productivity is helping Davies Turner keep its business on track for profitable growth.
“RPA has enabled us to take on rising business volumes without increasing our administrative headcount,” Gurney remarked. “If we hadn’t introduced this solution, I am certain that we would have had to add more personnel to cope with the growth. In just a short space of time, RPA has helped us engage with customers in a more proactive and effective way, and we are looking forward to building on these capabilities to help our business run even better in the future.”
