Concordia International Forwarding

Ray Beeks, Operations Manager at Concordia International Forwarding UK looks at the operational benefits of Sequoia.

“The transition between GeMS and Sequoia was straightforward, especially as an organisation like ours inevitably has a few more issues because our IT is based in the US. However, the transition was problem-free, ASM liaised directly with our US office and ensured everything went as planned. From a UK perspective, the migration was error free and easy.

Sequoia is more user friendly than GeMS, it’s modern in its look and feel and it’s easy to use and follow. GeMS was good and did its job but Sequoia is more intuitive. For instance, users can move from tab to tab quickly and successfully, which translates into higher productivity. For us, a key benefit is the time saved with multi-split entries, speeding up the process and increasing throughput. We do continue to use GeMS for our exports, so retain access to GeMS alongside Sequoia. That presents no problems because access between the two is perfect with no interface issues.

Productivity is time and money - goods cleared and delivered quickly. Reliability is also crucial, if software isn’t reliable and consistent it fails. There’s no point in something being the best one day if it falls down on the job the next. Sequoia is totally reliable.

Support from ASM is also a massive plus point for us. Individual agents from ASM can log onto our system, directly on to the desktop, and either talk our users through any problems, or sort them directly. For the initial training, we went to ASM for a day and they also visited our offices, but to be honest our team are all experienced and Sequoia is so easy to use that training was minimal. For example, with Sequoia you hover your mouse over the box and it tells you what’s required or you can enter a question mark and Sequoia tells you what to do.

The support we get from ASM is exceptional. They have a desire to iron out issues and resolve any problems. We live in an age when everything has to be instant. Years ago users would put up with a twenty-second dwell time while the computer ‘thought’ about it; if there’s any dwell time today ASM are always anxious to get to the bottom of why.

Quite simply, Sequoia comes up to our expectations - we went into it expecting it increase productivity plus save us time and effort - it has done everything we expected.”