Leedsafe at The Leading Edge of Industry

With 160 depots across the country construction company Downer need to be able to purchase personal protective equipment (PPE) quickly and efficiently for new and existing staff.

As Downer’s Auckland-based NZ BSC Manager Philip Bell says, “Health and safety is an important issue, particularly in a business like ours. Our teams out on work sites have personal protective equipment and if there’s any damage to it, it has to be replaced immediately”.

But whilst it made sense for each business entity to order their own equipment in terms of speed and efficiency, it was an onerous administrative task. Everybody buying equipment had to raise a purchase order, process the goods receipt and invoice match. The result was thousands of purchase orders and related paperwork for PPE every year.

“We’ve got a great supplier for stationery and office equipment with an excellent online portal” says Bell, “and we decided we wanted to work in a similar way for ordering our PPE”.

So Leedsafe stepped up to the challenge, working in collaboration with Downer and their stationery supplier to develop an online portal that would streamline the purchase process and allow Downer staff up and down the country to quickly and easily buy the safety workwear and accessories they need.
Clayton Suckling, National Account Manager for Leedsafe and his team, made frequent visits to the Downer head office in Auckland to keep Bell and his staff abreast with developments and to ensure they were listening to what Downer really needed.

The resulting system replicates the way we shop online in our personal lives – ordering from a website and then having the goods show up at our door. But when a large business is buying in this way they need a whole host of additional functionality says Bell. “We needed online validation, log-ins, access. We needed to ensure every order is coded to the correct project and department at the time of order”.

The system even offers approval escalation, meaning if a member of staff wants to order something that is above the amount they are authorised to spend then the system will automatically seek approval for the purchase from the next level of seniority.

The final result is a system that has driven down costs and unnecessary repetitive work for Downer and their staff and enables quick and easy ordering of PPE. And Bell is unequivocal about the process of working with Leedsafe.

“They were absolutely brilliant at listening to us, for us it wasn’t problematic at all. They were wonderful people to deal with, nothing is too much trouble – there’s a real investment in both the relationship and the product”.