Barloworld Coatings is a market leader in architectural and decorative finishes, as well as water based road marking paints. 

The Australian Barloworld Coatings group comprises of three acquisitions brought together and marketed in their own right:

• Taubmans

• Bristol

• White Knight

Barloworld Coatings has engaged Realisation to undertake a number of key knowledge management initiatives over the past several years.  Under our former name of HCi, we:

• Worked with a large credit team to formally record credit and receivables processes and procedures. The documented procedures were published to the intranet and a process of skills transfer and training set up an in-house capacity to maintain and manage the documentation. Key benefits of the exercise have been to allow quicker cross-training of personnel, more effective use of casual resources, and standardisation of activities.

• Barloworld uses Baan to implement a complex pricing structure that accommodates their different customer types. Baan tables and entities are used to permit calculation of the price for individual customers. Sales pricing decisions may involve complicated adjustments to these tables to produce the correct pricing effect. Realisation produced a manual which formalises the concepts, procedures and examples that capture the knowledge of the pricing implementers. The manual provides key documentation of pricing concepts and Baan procedures and makes the pricing implementation process both visible and able to replicated, thus securing this critical process.

• Barloworld's national Stores network is a key trade and retail outlet for coatings products. Effective Store operations are critical to the business and to the activities of other operational areas of the business. We developed an updated and comprehensive Stores policies and procedures manual for distribution to Stores personnel to provide detailed support for consistent Stores operations, from transactions processing, to staff, store and stock management. A maintenance process has been implemented to ensure that the manual will stay current and reflect changes in process and policy.

• Realisation conducted an audit of business practices relating to handling and storage of personal information under the Privacy Act, and delivered an implementation plan for compliance measures, including specification of practices and development of policies and procedures.  We then implemented the recommendations.

• Realisation developed a plan for the documentation of a set of financial procedures, covering accounts payable, banking and purchasing. As the procedures are designed for delivery via intranet and for ongoing in-house maintenance, the plan detailed the maintenance process and included a training plan.

• Realisation produced a series of user procedures covering the setup and management of e-commerce users within the online ordering and account review modules of Barloworld's ERP system.