Jennie Lai, Finance Manager of Riverstone (left) and Danny Yeung, Sales Manager of Compass have close co-operation.

Established in 2003, Riverstone delivers metal-working and manufacturing solutions to small and medium-sized Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) in North America. The company offers one-stop services on aluminium extrusion works, including sourcing and quality control. Just like many small-medium enterprises (SMEs), Riverstone has close business relationships with overseas clients and suppliers in China, in which a lot of documents are involved.

In order to handle abundant paperwork, Riverstone has adopted the DTTN and SAP Business One Solution which is implemented by Compass Business Solution Limited (Compass) to enhance cost effectiveness.

Eradicating geographical restraints

"The former system we adopted was mainly used for information sharing. Although we could send documents, including invoices and sales documents, to customers via the old system, it was not flexible. Most importantly, we could not check our inventory status on the old system. It's difficult to estimate the weight of aluminium as it's usually counted in ingots. Since the inventory records and the information on the order forms were inconsistent, information from the sales and purchase orders could not be exchanged. This resulted in errors regarding stock quantity when preparing packing lists and invoices, creating great pressure for the accounting department. They spent a lot of effort verifying the records", Jennie says. "Moreover, sending documents via the old system was ineffective. We have a representative office in the US with a time difference of more than 10 hours. After adopting the DTTN and SAP Business One Solution, all problems mentioned above have been solved and the documents are now sent to the US office immediately."

Danny Yeung, Sales Manager of Compass, explains, "All sales and purchase orders are stored in the ERP system. Before connecting with the DTTN platform, all data had to be reentered manually into different systems and then sent to buyers or forwarders via email. This duplicated working procedures. Since our system has been connected to DTTN, customers can send their documents to trading partners directly with only a few steps. DTTN is an electronic logistics platform that we can use to send documents to partners without any geographical or time constraints. This improves the whole operation of the company."

Leading the way in the electronic era

DTTN meets the needs of SMEs. With a small amount of investment and resources, SMEs can establish their own electronic supply chain and facilitate their business developments. As Danny says, "Generally speaking, SMEs cannot allocate a lot of resources to information technology and do not use Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) tools very often. As an integrated platform, SAP Business One Solution manages internal documents while DTTN facilitates the communications between traders. Once clients decide to adopt this solution, the installation process is very simple, in line with cost-effective principles. Meanwhile, the solution facilitates the future business development of SMEs. That's why we work with DTTN as it's a more comprehensive solution."

Jennie asserts that after adopting the new solution, the whole operation process improved by 20%. She says, "We have used the new solution for six months. The rate of human error has been reduced significantly while efficiency has improved. DTTN mirrors the prevailing e-commerce trend and enables us to lead in this field."