Madura Tea is now able to scale business operations and reduced label processing time from 2 weeks to minutes

Madura Tea, a fourth-generation family enterprise cultivating 250,000 tea bushes, processing and packing tea in New South Wales since 1978, decided it was time to start modernizing systems to increase their overall productivity. Guided by a commitment to sustainability and quality craftsmanship, the team honors its roots while embracing modern techniques. The very name “Madura” means “Paradise” in Tamil and encapsulates the harmony between heritage and progress that defines the estate. Madura underwent a digital transformation journey to migrate from disparate spreadsheets and legacy systems to a unified BarTender Cloud powered solution integrated with NetSuite and Cloud WMS. Madura Tea slashed manual data-entry errors, eliminated two-week reporting cycles, and reclaimed $250,000 in annual savings through improving efficiencies and automations.

Challenges:

Manual Spreadsheets and Legacy Labeling

Before BarTender Cloud, Madura Tea’s labeling workflow was a patchwork of spreadsheets and legacy tools that struggled to keep pace with daily orders and operations. Teams had individualized spreadsheets and there were different versions of product documents floating around which created extra work to hunt down the most updated and accurate version. With no system for component tracking, every batch risked mis-picks and repackaging errors, and best-before dates often had to be manually corrected. Meanwhile, a 1990s-era WMS forced staff to pre-print labels and manually key in data, turning simple tasks into bottlenecks and stretching reporting cycles out up to two weeks. With cost-of-goods (COGS) reports taking weeks, it meant that there was always a several week delay in getting insights into business health, operational efficiency, and profitability.

Solution:

BarTender Cloud Integrated with NetSuite and Cloud WMS

Today, purchase orders flow straight into NetSuite, and BarTender Cloud dynamically pulls the correct template for each job, with one-scan printing at the point of work. Madura Tea partnered with Cloud Coders to implement a NetSuite native Cloud WMS with BarTender Cloud saving Madura Tea over $250,000 annually through cost savings and immense savings in label processing time from two weeks to several minutes. Lot and batch numbers were pulled directly from Netsuite which ensured 100% label accuracy and full traceability from the fields to the shipments. Warehouse staff were able to simply scan incoming pallets with their Honeywell scanners and print labels on demand at the point of work. Complete template accuracy and real-time visibility dissolved the errors and blind spots of old spreadsheets, driving accountability, discipline, and more agile team culture.

“Now everything is in one place and visible, and the automations are great. There was not much of a learning curve to move into the cloud.”

– Carsten Leomker, Lead Engineering and Technology, Madura Tea Estates