Smith & Byford utilise Causeway Tradex to help better align their business goals for growth and reduce internal costs to drive profit, find out how in this case study video
Causeway Tradex is a true e-invoicing solution designed to provide the construction sector better transactional information between buyers and suppliers.
For a solution that works in the background, Causeway Tradex has enabled Smith & Byford to reduce manual tasks internally and better align resources to more value-added tasks. They have also been able to improve their supplier relationships as a result of more prompt payments.
Who is Smith & Byford?
David Ovington, CIO, Smith & Byford tells us more about the company, what they do and how Causeway Tradex has transformed its business operations.
“Smith and Byford provide gas, electric and building management services to general public sector companies, such as local housing authorities and local councils. We have around 150 staff in the office and about 220 engineers out on the road.
“The highest volume of work that Smith & Byford do is in domestic gas. We’re doing servicing and repair work for around 80,000 properties, all in the UK. They all require a service visit once a year. Depending on the age of stock they’re going to break down at various points. The ratio would generally be two visits per property per year, so that’s about 160,000 visits on an 80,000 stock list.
“A lot of the time there is a job that needs an order to get the part that’s required. On the gas side, we’re probably raising something like 3000 orders per month. And you can imagine as a manual process, that would be an absolute nightmare.”
Manually inputting data became a big problem for Smith & Byford
“Before Smith & Byford had systems in place, such as Tradex, everything was manual – spreadsheets, paper – really, processes that weren’t scalable as the business wanted to grow. With such a high volume of orders, the number of staff we’d need to process the order, send it off to the supplier, receive the delivery note and check that, then finally receive the invoice and check that off, amounted to about 3000 a month. It’s quite a monotonous task.
“People inputting that data all day long, they were bound to be errors. So the amount of manual work that was in there was massive. And a big problem for Smith & Byford is that it’s just not scalable. We needed a solution to that. Smith and Byford were introduced to Causeway Tradex, and it was a natural fit straight away.
How did Causeway Tradex help Smith & Byford overcome its data processing problems?
“Tradex runs in the background. There’s some initial set up if we bring a new supplier on board or a new supplier has joined the Tradex platform, as it happens, quite often, there’s a little bit of set up there just to link the Tradex account to our internal account numbers, and then we don’t touch the system, don’t log into Tradex at all.
“Everything is automated and we just get reports that tell us about things that actually do need some human intervention, which is a very low percentage of the throughput. The results we’ve achieved through Tradex, through automating and streamlining, that process number of staff we need internally to deal with those mundane admin tasks is very low now and our supplier relationships have grown immeasurably through this.”
Causeway Tradex has helped Smith & Byford process faster payments
“Faster payments in construction for us is a really important thing. We pass things through to payment as quickly as we can, and that’s only supported by Causeway Tradex, covering off all those admin tasks up to the point of payment.
“Here at Smith and Byford, we really are on a mission to become scalable and control admin costs within the office. Process efficiency, we’re looking at that across the whole business, whether it’s our engineer workforce, people in the office, people that deal with suppliers. Tradex is a massive piece of that jigsaw.
“It really does cover off that side, that whole supply chain side. Which means Corsa can support us and we can move on to other things operationally.”
Discover what Causeway Tradex can do for your business today.
Watch the full Causeway Tradex/Smith and Byford case study video here.
