Milner’s Brands commenced operations in the late 1950s as Sales Agent for Corning Glassworks USA and Josiah Wedgwood & Sons Ltd Britain, in Western Australia. In the early 1960’s Milner’s focused on tabletop, kitchenware and gourmet products and the business was expanded to each of the major Australian States.

Their extensive and impressive list of leading retail partners include: Kogan, The Good Guys, JB HIFI, Harvey Norman, Flybuys, David Jones, Amazon, Costco, Dick Smith.com.au, Peter’s of Kensington, Spec Savers and OPSM. 

Milner’s Brands have been Attaché customers for a number of years, but are early in their journey with three other integrated Access solutions – Access Financials, Unleashed and Mintsoft. Here, Managing Director Paul Ruane explains the experience so far, and his optimism for how these products will revolutionise a brand that has been around for half a century.

“We're importers, wholesale, and distributors of a broad range of products from housewares, consumer electronics and optical and eyewear. The Milner’s Brands business has been around for more than 50 years in different iterations, and of course, we've changed a lot over that time, and currently we employ about 20 people,” Paul Ruane, Managing Director, Milner’s Brands.

Why Access? 

“Our business is selling products, importing them and selling them to retailers and marketing the products as well. And that needs to be our focus. The less time we spend mucking around with accounting programs, the better. So, to have someone come in and be able to explain very thoroughly a solution to a problem like that, it's just a great relief.” 

“We’ve chosen to implement Access Financials. Because we are an importing business, with a warehouse, we have gone for Unleashed, and we're really keen to improve our order processing, so we've also opted for Mintsoft. 

"The sales side of things was quite good. I found our account manager, (Kim) has been so helpful and understanding of our issues, and has really done her best to resolve the issues we've got. We're not a huge business, and changing our accounting program is quite a big step for us.  

“I wouldn't change the sales process with Access. We’ve had people available to us every step of the way. Any questions that I've had, we've had teams, meetings, demonstrations. The webinars that Access put on are terrific.” 

Why now? 

“Just prior to COVID, we started selling more to end consumers, which we'd never done before. And it's an area where we think there's a lot of improvement to be made. So, we're looking at improving how we are picking and packing and order processing in the warehouse. And that's probably the biggest change that this business has had in a number of years.” 

“We’ve been on Attaché for many years, and even though our server has been updated recently, we find it’s running too slow, so we’ve been looking at cloud hosted solutions. We’ve been talking to Access about updating our accounting software, and it’s all come together at the one time with us able to look at moving off a server and onto a cloud-based accounting and warehouse management system.” 

Getting the business on board 

“As a leader you want your staff to be on board with any change like this. And I found that any changes you make are immediately met with bit of scepticism, or sometimes just straight-out resistance. Even the first email that I sent talking to the staff about this being an improvement or an upgrade was met with, ‘Well, I hope it's going to do this and what are we going to do about that?’ 

“So having the ability to say, ‘Listen, guys, you don't have to worry about it - there's an onboarding system that we're going through. They're going to help us through it. All of your questions will be answered. And we're aiming for a seamless transition, and it's not going to involve anyone doing any extra work or anything like that.’ To be able to say that is terrific.  

“The biggest reason for stalling or kicking the can down the road when it comes to this sort of thing is definitely the effect on morale or how the staff are going to react. The fact that you can provide a seamless transition is just so incredibly important. I can't emphasise that enough.”