Strong regional freight and logistics company Border Express has chosen Empower-HR for efficient management of its more than 600 employees during a period of strong growth.

The family-owned business, based in Albury, NSW, operates nine freight depots throughout the country. As well as its head office, the company has depots at Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane, Canberra, Melbourne, Perth, Darwin, Newcastle and on the Gold Coast.

Key reasons for choosing Empower-HR included the rich functionality of the software and the strong and positive support offered by Empower Masterpay.

Border Express HR Manager Anne McLeish said Empower-HR would contribute significantly to the efficiency of Border Express’ people management system. “We haven’t had an HR system, so we had a great diversity in our ways to capture payroll data and people management information, which led to a lot of incorrect and inconsistent information,” she said.

“A lot of our systems are paper-based, which made it very time-consuming. Empower will give us a lot more visibility and conformity in what we are doing. It will provide us with an integrated system going forward. We expect enormous growth in the next two or three years and nearly doubling in the next four years.”

Border Express www.borderexpress.com.au has grown since 1981 to become one of Australia's largest privately owned transport companies. Originating in Albury, the company has constructed, acquired and developed the necessary infrastructure to become a leading independent national carrier with multiple warehouse and distribution facilities in all of the major capital cities.

Ms. McLeish said choosing Empower-HR had been a long and carefully considered process. “We put together a project team with six people and used an external consultant to look at our business processes to work out what we needed from a system,” she said. “We produced a requirements document, and then went through a selective tender that included a detailed evaluation with site visits.

“Empower gave us great support during our evaluation process. They had very open communication and people got back to us straight away. During site visits, people said that Empower’s help desk facilities were quite good. We wanted to be sure we had ongoing support with the system, not just at the start. Obviously, we were reassured because Empower has been in the industry for more than 20 years with a lot of clients nationally.”

Ms. McLeish said Empower-HR was replacing an older software program that was difficult to manage and difficult to report with. “We are moving from a period-based system to a date-driven system, which gives us access to more information with greater flexibility,” she said.

“We had a very limited computer system which could only pay people weekly. There was no salary packaging and we were limited in the history we could keep. There was no facility to automatically update pay rates and we couldn’t report on historical year-to-date figures. A lot of our processes were very manual. “By contrast, Empower-HR offers integration with systems we have here, including General Ledger, training ledger and self-insurance software.

“From the CEO down, the people at Empower are very good to deal with. When Jade took over, we had a courtesy call that morning to let us know what was happening. People get back to us promptly, so it was a comfortable relationship from the very beginning.”

Border Express expects to have Empower-HR deployed before the end of this year. For more information about Empower-HR Version 9, call Daryl Rasheed on 08 8332 6988 or email This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it .