Red Stag is a world leader in the production of softwood construction lumber. They run a Supermill producing 550 thousand cubic metres of high-quality timber per year.

Red Stag demonstrates strong commitment to stay at the forefront of technological advancement within the Timber industry in all they do. Their dynamic modernization process has seen them invest in excess of $100m to date, resulting in Red Stag having the most technically advanced structural sawmill and processing facilities in the southern hemisphere.

An industry lumbered with complexity and manual process

Ordering in the timber industry is complex because throughout the supply chain, companies have differing nomenclatures for the same products.

Product names, SKU and product codes are different between retailers, trade merchants, building industry partners and each timber merchant for the same product.

For Red Stag, this means at each step they need to match up what a customer is wishing to purchase with the products that Red Stag stock.

This creates hours and hours of data re-entry from skilled staff to translate and key in the product with the correct identifier. It also opens the opportunity for a hotbed of errors and issues with mis-ordering, incorrect pricing, credits and costly returns.

Before Vesta, this involved a time-consuming manual process. Skilled staff with a strong understanding of the industry would have to get a paper copy, identify the product match, transfer that into Red Stag’s information and then enter it into the system, for every order.

Streamlining Red Stag’s workflows

Implementing Vesta meant Red Stag could, in one step, set up product mapping between their identifiers and their customers, linking the correct products together. This has enabled Red Stag to transfer the data electronically and smoothly from one system to another, every time, without the hours of costly manual work.

“It’s like a middle man that takes (the data) and translates it from their SKU information into our SKU information. So that’s where the product mapping of product code to product code just becomes vital so we all know we’re speaking about the same thing.” — Hermione Richards, Red Stag Timber

A single source of truth – saving time and errors

The key benefit Red Stag has experienced using Vesta is a saving of many hours of work both from data re-entry and finding and fixing issues created by human error. This allows them a strong confidence in their data, they know they can rely on it to be consistently accurate.

“We get less errors when people are typing things in. so it gives us one source of truth, so we know, this product equals this product and there is no getting it wrong, no interpretation its always the same every time we bring the data through.” — Hermione Richards, Red Stag Timber

Improved communication with customers

This consistency and accuracy in the data also help improve Red Stags relationships with customers. Using Vesta enables Red Stag to improve communication and be faster in their turn-around with orders. Using Vesta has also resulted in fewer issues or errors causing delays and affecting customers.

“You need to keep improving and you need better lines of communication, so you need products like Vesta that will streamline that whole process and make the communication between all the different parties easier and smoother.” — Hermione Richards, Red Stag Timber

Ability to scale

Vesta has also allowed Red Stag the room to scale. As their business continues to grow rapidly, implementing tools such as Vesta which help them to do more, faster, have been an essential part of their toolkit.

“It is one of those things, our business at Red Stag is getting bigger and bigger all the time, and we need tools that can make us do more work more efficiently and products like Vesta are just becoming a no brainier.