Managing 1 million transactions daily, global textile rental leader Alsco turned to Abel™ to better track activities across 135 branches worldwide.
With revenues in excess of $US1 billion, and more than 15,000 employees in operations around the world, Alsco is recognised as a global industry leader in the textile services sector. This privately owned and operated company, founded in Nebraska in 1889, not only pioneered the supply of clean linens and uniform to businesses, but continues nearly 120 years later, to set the benchmarks for the industry; worldwide. Providing the critical operational and business capability to support Alsco’s worldwide operations is Abel – a robust Enterprise Resource Planning system developed in New Zealand.
From headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah, Alsco’s textile rental business operations currently span the United States, Canada, Germany, Italy, Singapore, Australia, Brazil and New Zealand. In operational terms that translates into a daily requirement to process, clean and deliver literally millions of items – from serviettes, tablecloths, towels, sheets, and uniforms to hospital and healthcare garments. The ability to seamlessly manage such a multitude of transactions requires accurate information to support all facets of their business operations.
In 2000 Alsco identified that their IT system could no longer provide the level of support needed for a worldwide operation that was rapidly expanding. Jim Kearns, Vice President of Finance and Chief Financial Officer, led a team to search for an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system that would provide the integrated operational and financial business capability necessary to manage the company’s worldwide operation into the future. They found their solution in Abel, a robust, flexible and easy to manage ERP system from New Zealand’s Abel Software Ltd.
“In Abel we saw the capability to meet our critical requirements for efficiency, speed, flexibility and scalability,” says Jim Kearns. “Abel has delivered all that and more.”
Taking Abel’s core distribution and financial functionality, a combined Alsco and Abel development team built an integrated system to support Alsco’s specific textile rental business requirements, including counting, scheduling, routing and delivery-run processes, for its North American and Australasian branch operations.
For Larry Tomsic, Alsco’s Information Technology Director, a key advantage of Abel was that it enabled the development team to replicate Alsco’s existing document flows. “We have also been able to introduce common product codes for all of our USA and Canadian operations as well as a user-friendly process to support the maintenance requirements for our rental linen and garments”. Abel’s flexibility and scalability has delivered bottom-line benefits right across Alsco’s operations.
“It has reduced and streamlined the number of links and indexes so that the database size and growth rate has not precluded us from installing and using Abel in our largest branches,” says Larry Tomsic. “We have been able to provide each of our branches with an enhanced capability for tracking and invoicing of the items supplied to our customers”. And he is delighted with the level of accuracy provided with the Abel system data management. “Abel accurately and efficiently handles over 1 million transactions daily as it supports our business processes”, he reports.
While the task of implementing a new system into 135 branches worldwide initially appeared rather daunting, the Abel Project Manager, Dana Craig, is enjoying her role. “The Abel implementations progress smoothly and on time. Alsco employees find Abel intuitive and user friendly, the Abel data structure is such that users are able to rectify any errors easily, and new employees pick up and learn to use Abel very quickly” says Dana.
Abel has been installed at Alsco for 10 years and at present Alsco has 3900 concurrent users using Abel to support its business in USA, Canada, Germany, Italy, Thailand, China, Malaysia, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand.
