Location: Blackmore Vale and Shaftesbury, Dorset, United Kingdom
Industry: Dairy and Food Processing and Manufacturing
Website: www.bvdairy.co.uk
Founded in 1958 as a family farm in England’s West Country, BV Dairy is now a thriving modern business. Each year, the company purchases 35 million liters of milk from dairy farms within a 25-mile radius of their production facility in Shaftesbury, Dorset and turns them into dairy products for food distribution and manufacturing firms. BV Dairy’s range includes their award-winning Dorset clotted cream, as well as yogurts, buttermilk, soft cheese, and mascarpone.
SPRINTURF specializes in the manufacture and installation of artificial turf surfaces. Founded in the 1990s and acquired by Integrated Turf Solutions (ITS) in 2010, SPRINTURF has installed more than 1,800 turf systems for leading sports programs, colleges, and professional athletic teams across North America and abroad.
Compared to other turf product companies, SPRINTURF is the only one to manufacture 100 percent of its fiber and turf in house and in the United States. Headquartered in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, these activities are performed at the world’s most sophisticated turf extrusion facilities—located in Dadeville, Alabama and the state-of-the-art tufting and coating plant in Chatsworth, Georgia.
“We are currently the third largest manufacturer in the marketplace, with our sights firmly set on capturing the top spot within the next few years,” said Justin Reddy, chief operations officer and president of SPRINTURF. “No one can match the quality of our product line. Nearly everyone else manufactures their systems overseas, which reduces direct oversight and can lead to delays. All of our turfs are American-made under intensive quality controls. The highest care is placed on their manufacture and installation. Many surfaces only last five to six years. We have the highest rate of fields in the ground for 10 or more years, as well as the industry’s shortest turnaround time.”
“DocStar gives us the power to add and retrieve more documents to and from the system. It increases our accuracy, efficiency, and traceability. Furthermore, this solution has plenty of flexibility that lets us tune and tweak workflows as our business processes change and grow. Most of all, the introduction of DocStar has allowed us to streamline processes and save time—notably in terms of invoice approval and delivery note processing—because it brings all of the relevant information and documentation together in one place.”
-Mark Damen, ERP Systems Manager | BV Dairy
“This is a very competitive business. Despite the quality of our products, many projects come down to the lowest bid. Through DocStar, we’ve been better able to manage our costs. This has allowed us to increase end-to-end efficiencies, enabling even more competitive bids.”
-Justin Reddy | SPRINTURF
Averaging 200 installations a year over the past seven years, SPRINTURF’s business has grown 30 percent annually under current ownership. Driven by the quest to deliver superior quality and durability, the company decided to optimize internal efficiencies by implementing the DocStar Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system with advanced workflow and reporting and intelligent data capture.
After thoroughly researching several options, it became clear that DocStar was the right choice for SPRINTURF. Prior to DocStar, the company handled all its reporting and invoicing with paper processes. Now, SPRINTURF is able to improve productivity and eliminate time-consuming manual work.
“We literally had one employee assigned to trafficking all the paperwork,” explained Reddy. “Even then, we had limited visibility and no idea when invoices were stuck in the process until a vendor called about payment.”
“Since going live with DocStar in May 2017, we’ve eliminated the need for a full-time person to hunt everything down,” he added. “This individual was reassigned to deal with other priorities. This alone saved 40 hours of labor a week, while making other internal operations more efficient—without adding overhead.”
Another benefit was the solution’s ability to merge the company’s three distinct accounting platforms. This included separate systems for addressing plant and manufacturing processes, landscaping sales to residential owners, and installation. In addition to consolidating these efforts into one centralized system with more direct oversight, Reddy credits DocStar for pushing vendor invoices through accounting in real time and providing greater visibility into the organization’s project costs.
“This is a very competitive business,” said Reddy. “Despite the quality of our products, many projects come down to the lowest bid. Through DocStar, we’ve been better able to manage our costs. This has allowed us to increase end-to-end efficiencies, enabling even more competitive bids.”
“Plus, we’re nearly paperless,” he added. “The time spent on purchase orders alone has been reduced by two-thirds. We no longer have to scan and print paperwork multiple times to get it through the system or go back and forth with our other facilities. Everything is indexed for easy routing, fulfillment, and look up.”
According to Brennan Crimm, a member of SPRINTURF’s accounting staff, the invoicing process through DocStar has reduced his personal efforts by nearly an hour a day. “DocStar has certainly sped things up, making the process much quicker and smoother. We no longer have to deal with stacks and stacks of paper, which were occasionally mishandled or even lost. Now, it only takes minutes to find whatever we need. It’s all in the system in one centralized location. Nothing could be easier.”