Howarth Timber and Building Supplies is the UK's largest privately owned timber company, with over 180 years of trading experience and more than 1,000 employees. The business operates from 33 timber and builders' merchant branches, alongside dedicated manufacturing divisions supplying specialist timber engineering products and services.
Around 15% of Howarth Timber's suppliers were already using EDI, but the remaining suppliers, roughly 60% of all invoices received, weren't a fit for the technology due to size or technical capability. The business needed a digital partner that could bring those suppliers onto electronic invoicing too.
Standard EDI only worked for a fraction of Howarth Timber's supplier base. The majority of suppliers, representing 60% of invoices received, had no realistic route onto electronic invoicing, leaving a large share of the business's invoice volume stuck on manual processing.
60% of invoices received weren't suitable for standard EDI, due to supplier size or technical capability, leaving the majority of transactions on manual processing.
33 branches meant 33 different ways of doing things. Processes drifted across the business with no single way of working.
Klipboard ERP needed to talk to all of it, cleanly, without a bolt-on that caused more work than it saved.
