How Living Springs cut a week of invoicing down to an hour, halved driver scheduling with MiniVend, and still kept the personal service that’s earned customer loyalty for decades.
The Living Springs team and one of the delivery fleet
Living Springs has been delivering spring water across WA’s South West for more than three decades, water in 15 litre and 600ml bottles, plus the coolers, dispensers, cups and accessories that go with them. Tony and Alison Busher took over the business in 1999, and in 2024 it passed to the next generation, brothers in-law Mitch and Luke, who now run things day to day as directors, backed by a small, hands-on crew of drivers and depot staff. These days Luke covers the rural runs in the bigger truck, while a smaller “baby truck” handles the closer CBD and town deliveries.
Living Springs water, ready to pour
Invoicing: from a week to an hour
Invoicing fell to Anya, Living Springs’ operations manager, and by her own estimate, it used to take the better part of a week. Pulling figures together, checking what had actually gone out on the trucks against what needed billing, then getting it all entered, it was a slow, manual process with plenty of room for things to slip through.
These days the same job takes about an hour. Orders are already sitting in the system from the moment they’re placed, so there’s no re-keying numbers off paper dockets or chasing down what was delivered versus what was invoiced. Anya checks it over and it’s done, freeing up the best part of a week every cycle for everything else running a water business involves.
MiniVend takes over the driver run
Scheduling the driver runs used to eat into the week too. With MiniVend handling that side of things, Living Springs has cut the time spent organising who’s going where roughly in half. For a business running multiple trucks across everything from CBD deliveries to rural routes, that’s hours back for Mitch and Luke to spend actually running the business rather than working out the logistics of it.
Loading the day’s run at the depot
The risk in changing what works
None of that counted for much if it came at the cost of the relationships Living Springs has spent decades building. Some customer relationships go back nearly as long as Luke’s family has been in the industry: the better part of 30 years. So when the business started looking at moving off manual processes and paper dockets, the nerves weren’t really about the software. They were about what a clumsy switch might do to trust that had taken decades to build.
“We really didn’t want to mess anything up,” says Anya.
On the road across WA’s South West
A smooth switch, with a few hold-outs
In the end, the move to EasyVend went largely without drama. A handful of long-time customers missed having a paper docket in hand at first, simply out of habit, but Anya says most came around quickly, and there’s been no significant negative feedback since.
When something actually went wrong
What’s stuck with the team more than the switch itself is what happened when a mistake slipped through. Not long after coming on board, Living Springs accidentally invoiced a delivery run that hadn’t even gone out yet, half a route billed before the trucks had left the depot. It’s the kind of error that can spiral fast if nobody picks up the phone, but Anya says that’s not how it went:
“We called EasyVend straight away and said, we’ve made a mistake, how do we fix this. They ran a report, talked us through exactly what to do, and sorted the backend while we handled the customers on our end. I’m not talking to any kind of robot at all.”
That kind of responsiveness, she adds, hasn’t been a one-off. She singles out being able to reach EasyVend’s Maylene directly rather than waiting on a generic queue, and says feedback gets met with an attitude of “let’s see how we can improve” rather than being brushed aside.
Two family businesses, one good fit
EasyVend and Living Springs are both family businesses, and that made the relationship feel different from the start.
For Living Springs, moving away from paper dockets and long-standing manual processes was never just a software decision. It meant trusting someone else with the way the business runs, the way customers are looked after, and the reputation the family has built over decades.
EasyVend understands that because we work the same way. We know family businesses are personal. Decisions are made carefully, customers are remembered, and trust is earned through showing up when it matters. When Living Springs needed support, they were not dealing with a faceless ticket queue. They were speaking to people who understood the pressure of keeping a family-run operation moving.
That shared understanding is a big part of why the partnership works. EasyVend did not just give Living Springs a system. We gave them a way to modernise without losing the hands-on, personal service their customers already trusted.
Would they recommend it?
Asked directly whether she’d recommend EasyVend to other water or beverage distributors, Anya didn’t hesitate:
“Yes, I’d definitely recommend it. It’s easy once you know the pathways, and any feedback we’ve given has actually been taken on board instead of getting brushed off. We’ve been really impressed.”
What’s changed for Living Springs:
• Invoicing down from about a week to roughly an hour
• Driver scheduling time cut in half with MiniVend
• One ordering system covering everything from 15L bottles to coolers and dispensers, across residential, commercial and industrial customers
• Real, responsive support when something goes wrong, sorted by people, not a ticket queue
• A platform switch that respected decades of customer trust, with barely a hiccup
Want a smoother way to run your distribution business? Book a demo with EasyVend