Westmill Foods: one workspace instead of five systems.

Niki Morley manages logistics at Westmill Foods. Her mornings followed the same pattern: open the daily reports from Westmill's freight forwarders, one for each business unit, and work through the status of every shipment.

"We are contracted to several different carriers. I would either have to open and check several daily reports from our forwarder or login to various different carrier websites to find out the information I was looking for, like ETAs."

The information existed. It was spread across several reports, multiple carrier portals and various spreadsheets, so finding it meant hunting through different systems every day. Time went on looking for information, not acting on it.

Every invoice meant another hunt.

Invoice verification had the same problem. When a forwarder sent an invoice quoting a purchase order number, Niki matched it against spreadsheets, cross-referenced carrier websites, and checked dates and routing before she could approve the charges.

Approvals were slow, and the checking pulled time away from more strategic work.

Westmill doesn't look for one big silver bullet. It finds specific problems and fixes them one by one. These were the two it picked.

Two bottlenecks, one workspace.

Beacon gave Westmill one place to see every shipment, with live ETAs across all its carriers and forwarders.

Niki set up Live Boards so each team sees what's relevant to them without asking her. When she suspects a problem with a few shipments, she builds a board, shares it with the colleagues involved, and adds comments and documents. They check it when they need to, with no back-and-forth emails asking for updates.

Invoices changed too. Niki types the PO number into Beacon and the dates, routing and carrier information appear straight away. What used to mean checking several sources now takes seconds.

Two hours back every week.

Niki estimates she saves 1 to 2 hours a week on invoice verification alone. Other users across Westmill are seeing the same time savings.

The bigger change is speed. "Because the information is instantly accessible we can give instant answers." When customers ask a question, the team answers it there and then. When issues come up, they respond faster.

It has changed how Westmill shares information internally too. Niki pulls reports from Beacon and shares them across the business in a few clicks.

Next up: dropping the paid forwarder report.

Niki is building Live Boards with custom fields for each business unit. Today those units rely on a once-a-day report from their forwarder, which Westmill pays for.

Once the boards cover what every unit needs, Westmill can stop paying for that report entirely. Time savings became better information. Better information is becoming a cost saving.