cieTrade Helps CI Forest Build a More Effective Operation
Learn how Columbia International Forest Products leveraged cieTrade’s cloud platform for the forest products industry to optimize productivity, reduce costly errors and gain insight through specialized industry reports.
Company
Columbia International Forest Products provides a full-range of sales, technical assistance and logistics services of pulp and paper products. In promoting responsible management of forests, they hold several certifications (including FSC and SFI certifications) in accordance with the standards demanded by customers and stakeholders worldwide.
Headquarters
Vancouver, Washington
Industry
Pulp and Paper, Trading & Export
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Columbia International Forest Products is a pulp and paper trading company with over 40 years of experience buying and selling pulp, paper and recycled fiber products for both domestic and export customers. Since its inception, the company has emphasized the importance of quality, detail and safety while providing their clients with the finest documentation, logistics services and pulp and paper products. Prior to cieTrade, their team composed sales and purchase orders, generated invoices and organized their transactions in QuickBooks Desktop; however they found their processes required a significant amount of manual-entry and workarounds, leading the team to look for a specialized solution to manage their operation.
Industry-specific features that simplify operations
Having employees with prior experience using cieTrade gave CI Forest a strong understanding of the platform’s capabilities. When evaluating it against alternatives, they found that cieTrade was the only solution with the features that could fully meet their industry-specific needs. For instance, being able to buy and sell in different units of measure is critical not only for pulp and paper traders, but for commodity traders in general, yet QuickBooks and the other platforms that the team researched lacked this capability. According to Trisha Lucier, CI Forest’s Paper Sales Coordinator, this led to inefficiencies when invoicing their customers. “We were forced to create separate invoices— one in QuickBooks with one unit of measure and another manually in Excel with a different unit of measure— leading to unnecessary double work.” Another key advantage was cieTrade’s unique counterparty model, which allowed companies to be designated as both customers and suppliers, as is also common in the trading industry.
“We quickly realized that none of the other programs on the market understood the nuances of the pulp and paper industry– such as billing in ST, MT or even MSF for certain products– but cieTrade had all of the basic features we needed out-of-the-box, saving us significant costs in our transition to a new system.”
Improving documentation accuracy and eliminating keystrokes
For CI Forest, precise documentation isn’t just important— it’s a requirement. As an FSC certified company, every document issued to customers and suppliers must include specific details to meet their certification’s standards, leaving little room for inaccuracies. At the time, QuickBooks lacked the necessary functionality to streamline documentation, forcing the team to rely on free-form templates which required them to manually type information into each field. This process was not only time-consuming but also increased the risk of costly mistakes. By switching to cieTrade, CI Forest transformed its documentation process. Now, all documents are instantly generated with information from their sales and purchase orders, shipments and pre-defined terms and conditions— saving time and eliminating manual entry while ensuring data consistency and minimizing human error.
Learn how cieTrade can help you generate and manage your specialized shipping and billing documents.
Flexible reporting to meet business and customer demands
Like any company with extensive internal and customer reporting demands, reporting flexibility was essential for CI Forest. Before cieTrade, generating reports was a frustrating and time-consuming process. According to Toni Weaver, Logistics Manager at CI Forest, mining data out of QuickBooks required extensive manual effort and building customer reports in spreadsheets added an extra layer of complexity. With cieTrade, their team now has instant access to specialized reports in just a few clicks, making it easier to manage daily activity and business performance while providing comprehensive monthly reports for their customers. “cieTrade’s customizable inquiries also allow our team members to rearrange report columns according to each of their specific needs, while their wide range of filters help simplify data-heavy reports and drill down into the exact data we need,” says Weaver. The platform’s seamless export to Excel feature provides their team with even greater flexibility, ensuring that reports can be further refined and adjusted as needed.
Seamless implementation experience with a strong support team
Implementing new software can often be challenging, but for CI Forest, transitioning to cieTrade’s cloud platform was a straightforward process. The system’s user-friendly and intuitive design made it easy for their team to adopt, allowing them to quickly get up and running. During onboarding, cieTrade provided CI Forest with detailed data upload files, which made it easier for them to get master data, such as customer and supplier records, out of QuickBooks and into cieTrade. Another key factor that made implementation seamless was cieTrade’s highly responsive support team providing quick solutions any time questions or issues arose. “cieTrade always went beyond just helping us solve our problems. They also sent the resources and information we needed to resolve the question if it came up again. Our experience with them has always been a 10/10,” says Weaver.
“After getting our database set up, having a support team that understood our business and was always accessible to assist us made it much easier for our team to quickly go live in the system.”
By transitioning to cieTrade, CI Forest has streamlined its operations, eliminated manual inefficiencies and gained access to industry-specific features that QuickBooks and other platforms lacked. From automating documentation and improving reporting capabilities to simplifying customer invoicing, cieTrade has provided the tools and flexibility they needed to support their growing business. With a user-friendly platform and a responsive support team, CI Forest was able to implement the system quickly and has continued to deliver high-quality pulp and paper trading services to their customers.
Company
Columbia International Forest Products provides a full-range of sales, technical assistance and logistics services of pulp and paper products. In promoting responsible management of forests, they hold several certifications (including FSC and SFI certifications) in accordance with the standards demanded by customers and stakeholders worldwide.
Headquarters
Vancouver, Washington
Industry
Pulp and Paper, Trading & Export
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