Procurement News Notice |
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| PNN | 5512 |
| Work Detail | This content has been produced in commercial partnership with Telstra. Like many start-ups, naturally sugar-free soft drink company Nexba has made full use of technology to streamline its operations, accounting, logistics, workflow and communications. That means you won't find a computer server and its corresponding complexity and management problems anywhere inside the Sydney offices of the six-year-old Nexba, which is poised to tackle the global market with its range of naturally sugar-free drinks. Nexba, like most start-ups that are able to begin operations with a clean technology sheet, has used cloud-based software, tools and services from the moment founders Troy Douglas and Drew Bilbe decided to take on the soft drink world. Being born in the cloud like Nexba, gives a technical agility advantage over large organisations that are often locked into ageing, inflexible on-premise software and hardware systems that are hard to fix or renew without disrupting day to day business operations. Nexba offers a range of soft drinks that avoid the problems associated with calorie-laden sugar drinks and those that use artificial sweeteners. The company sweetens its drinks with a blend of stevia plant and natural sweetener erythritol, a sugar alcohol that gives 70 per cent of the sweetness of sugar with only 6 per cent of the calories. Erythritol is not metabolised by mouth bacteria, so does not lead to tooth decay and is free of the gas and bloating effects of sugar alcohols commonly used as sweeteners. The naturally sugar free pitch has paid off with customers. These days, Nexba drinks are sold by national retailer Coles among other distributors and in 2015 Nexba won the Telstra NSW Micro Business of the Year award. In the race to build market share and take on the incumbent soft drink industry, Mr Douglas says that in the digital world with its mass social media outreach, his business needs to be more than just another product. "The ability for us to engage technology helps us run a business that is able to challenge what is a multi-national industry," Mr Douglas says. "All of the operational side of the business is cloud based," says Mr Bilbe. "We wouldn't invest in static software, it is all about that cloud-based stuff." Nexba uses the Xero online accounting software, Dropbox for cloud storage and file exchange, Geckoboard as the business monitoring and visualisation tool or "dashboard" and the Highrise customer relationship management (CRM) package. Hardware devices such as mobiles, tablets and laptops are all Apple, while Telstra is the choice for mobile connectivity. "We are on the road a lot and I travel a bit internationally as well. The ability to be connected on the go and from roaming locations overseas is really important," says Mr Douglas of the decision to go with Telstra for communications bandwidth. Simplicity and ease of use score heavily with Mr Douglas and Mr Bilbe when it comes to software choices such as Highrise. "We primarily use Highrise for tasks and contact management. "When you are in meetings you can take notes which are automatically tracked against that contact," says Mr Douglas. Having the business in the cloud means Nexba's team of eight people and outside contractors patching into the company are always in sync and looking at the same thing. Also, being cloud based makes switching software vendors simple. When Highrise switched owners, the Nexba founders worried they could lose support and kicked the tyres of other CRM vendors. They found switching CRM providers would not be difficult. "We found the exporting of tasks and contacts and stuff is so simple when you are cloud based, it would have made switching really easy," says Mr Bilbe. In the end, Nexba's fears about support worries were unfounded and the firm stayed with Highrise. "Fortunately for us we didn't have to go down that process but it gave us assurance that being a cloud-based business makes it easy to switch," says Mr Bilbe. Nexba uses Geckoboard as its business dashboard. The tool draws in information from the other software platforms to give a dynamic read on where key business metrics such as geographic sales are at. Geckoboard allows the entire team to see at a glance whether critical targets are being met. With Geckoboard we now have a couple of screens in our office which display key areas like live sales. We have a map that shows how interactivity with our website is tracking and live feeds with social media," says Mr Douglas. "The engagement we get out of having those screens in our office is a big thing." The next step for Nexba is expanding offshore next year and having a stable and settled cloud base "Technology is critical to how we build our internal team and also critical to how we engage external partners for growth," says Mr Douglas. "So we have become a lot clearer on functions and why we are using certain platforms within the business." |
| Country | Australia , Australia and New Zealand |
| Industry | Information Technology |
| Entry Date | 15 Oct 2016 |
| Source | http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/small-business/smallbiz-tech/cloud-computing-rewriting-the-business-playbook-for-australian-startup-20160902-gr76w2.html |
