Challenge

Mineral Resources was struggling with a lack of visibility across their freight operations, with no efficient mechanism for reconciling transport costs from across their internal business units.

Their existing ERP-driven process required site personnel to raise and approve transport requests manually. Any approved documents were distributed across their transport carrier network who then managed freight movements independently – providing sporadic updates manually (email, phone & text) upon request.

Transport carrier partners were also required to manually breakdown freight movements by a specific cost center before invoicing, resulting in significant delays and inaccuracies in financial reporting. MinRes determined interoperability with a leading Transport Management System (TMS) was required and kicked-off a vendor selection process.

Solution

Bustle TMS was selected and deployed to seamlessly aggregate data from MinRes’s internal ERP and automate critical steps in the freight lifecycle, such as:

• Invoicing: Through a seamless ERP integration, purchase orders are now automatically published into Bustle TMS, ensuring accurate and real-time alignment of transport tasks.
• Order Dispatch: Transport carrier partners now automatically receive job orders based on pre-configured rules, including dual manifesting functionality across both the distribution centers and the transport carrier premises – streamlining freight consolidation, dispatch and fulfilment.
• Event Updates & Real-time Tracking: Transport pick-up and delivery events feed directly into MinRes’ ERP in real-time, offering internal operations complete line-level movement visibility and live status updates on every purchase order.

Impact

Following the implementation of Bustle, MinRes now operates a freight system with enhanced end-to-end visibility, real-time tracking across all purchase orders and multi-freight legs, as well as experiencing:

• Faster Freight Reconciliation with more accurate cost attribution by cost center with minimal manual intervention.
• Increased Operational Efficiency with drastically reduced admin effort for both internal MinRes staff and their transport partners.
• Data-driven Insights consisting of two years of operational data flowing through Bustle, MinRes has successfully built an executive dashboard and freight gap analysis tool, supporting proactive decision-making and ongoing haulage optimisation.
• A Robust and Scalable Platform designed for modern freight operations, laying the foundations to support substantial mining service growth and increased operational complexity.