Naturezone is a specialist distributor of fresh and short life products. They were one of the first companies to distribute and merchandise products such as fresh fruit and vegetables, healthy snack food under their own brand and a portfolio of other related products to the service station industry.

They were pioneers in this industry segment and are now the preferred suppliers for all oil companies. They have a core product range of around 200 products (varies seasonally). They started around 8 years ago from the basement of their home and now have a warehouse, large freezer / chiller, 6 refrigerated trucks in Auckland and distributors over most of the country.

Sales were made from refrigerated trucks, with a handwritten order of around 20-30 line items completed at the time of visit. In the office half of a full time staff member's time was spent in putting the orders into their computer accounting system. It was easy for sales people to make calculation errors when multiplying out line items and totaling sales. Director, Neil Blayney said, "We discovered the mistakes when we were inputting the data, then we had to ring our clients or their head office. Correcting the errors cost us time, but also our client's time."

Naturezone invested in SalesLink Mobile software running on a Symbol SPT-1700 handhelds with a built in laser barcode reader. They also carry Canon BJC85 portable inkjet printers in their trucks, which allow them to print professional invoices on the spot when they complete their orders. At the end of each day, the trucks return to the warehouse and synchronise their orders using a cradle to connect to SalesLink Server and their MYOB accounting package.

The drivers were initially nervous because they had no previous experience with this type of technology, but they found it very straight forward to pick up. They now go into the service station, scan product shelf labels and enter the quantity. They were also nervous about not having a hard copy of the order incase something happened to their data, so they automatically print two copies of each invoice. This gave them reassurance that they had redundancy protection, now that they no longer had their order books.

Return of Investment estimated to be 150%. "As the business grew, we had 20 hours a week to do more productive stuff such as telephone sales,” said Neil. "It also gave us time to follow up debtors and other tasks which are very time consuming for a company that doesn't have an in-house accountant." Neil said that the admin staff of their customers have been very pleased with the change and it has saved many, many phone calls. Scanning has also saved a lot of time in the sales process. Naturezone sales people are now averaging 25 to 30 orders a day and the efficiency has enabled more products to be handled in the same amount of time.