Lying 180 kilometres north of Brisbane, the Gympie Goldfield has historically produced over 4 million ounces of gold. While production has tailed off in recent years, according to its new owners, Gympie Eldorado Gold, the latest exploration programmes are targeting potential multi-million ounce deposits.

Like many mining companies, Gympie Eldorado Gold supports its exploration activity through early-stage production, a financial balancing act that involves using the most modern tools to evaluate possible scenarios. Greentree’s business management suite is one such modern tool crucial for the company to drill into its own business performance and provide for its future.

Gympie Eldorado chose to implement Greentree’s Financial Management, Inventory, Fixed Assets, Job Costing, Workflow Designer and Payroll for Greentree modules before its recent acquisition of Gympie Gold.

Financial controller Phil Higgins says the company searched for a business management system to replace Attaché, their 10-year-old accounting package.

“We had a variety of reasons for the review and the acquisition of Gympie Gold certainly speeded it up. In essence, we needed to change because of our complex reporting requirements. Attaché was just too old and accounting-specific for our future needs. It was not able to sustain the necessary reporting levels — not without a lot of modification anyway.”

“We wanted an integrated system and, as we are a hard-rock mining organisation, we required a powerful job-cost capability to control our heavy maintenance programme. The new system had to be flexible enough to enable us to review multiple budgets and use different budgeting methods easily.”

Deeper understanding
Higgins says he already knew of Greentree (who were recently recognised as one of 25 global rising stars by MIS magazine), but gained more detailed product information from the internet.

“I had heard of CBA, which was a good package, and understood the connection between CBA and Greentree. I already knew a lot of products on the market and overall I reviewed eight, including Timberline and ACCPAC. Greentree still came out on top,” he says.

“Greentree stood out from the rest as it was obvious that it wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill product. We were immediately impressed and sold on it, especially our engineers,” Higgins says.

Gympie Eldorado gained a deeper understanding of Greentree’s suitability during a full demonstration from its Greentree Business Partner.

“Our engineers are very impressed as they can use different production models easily for different budgets and look at different working scenarios. As we are cash driven and engineering focused, this level of budget control is important to us. Greentree’s job costing module and overall integration just sold it to us.”

“We presented our Greentree findings to our senior management team. I think they made up their minds half way through the meeting. The final decision was made in a week,”  says Higgins.

The company was further convinced after talking to a similar Greentree customer.

“We were able to speak to another mining company successfully using Greentree. They have done some complex things with it, which was encouraging.”

Gympie Eldorado Mining’s Greentree Business Partner worked closely with the company to meet the required timeframes, and managed to implement Greentree in just two weeks, in time for the acquisition.

“The consultants were very professional and helpful. We knew they would work with us to achieve a quick and smooth implementation,” Higgins says.

More autonomy for managers
Greentree’s Job Costing module delivers the vital flexibility that Gympie Eldorado needs to drill down on costs and labour. It also allows the company to vary the budgeting system depending on what type of ground it is mining.

“Greentree allows us to look at our labour and production levels, and we can use it to manage our forward commitments, extra labour requirements and our forecasting. We now have our entire data up to date and ready to use.”

Payroll for Greentree is fully integrated with the Job Costing module, enabling the company to manage the costs and dataflow for over 100 employees.

“Human resource management is the biggest headache for most companies, as you’re dealing with people and large volumes of data,” says Higgins. “Greentree’s solution seems well suited to relieving the data workload, especially as we can electronically manage the information with the range of templates and forms available.”

Higgins believes Gympie Eldorado Mining’s financial management will be enhanced by Greentree’s full integration and flexibility.

“Avoiding hard copy reports; giving management views of live, accurate data; and the ability to print a range of different reports are all the plus points that we saw straight away with Greentree.”

“With its integration we can get all the information for reports and analysis coming from one common base.” Higgins says this provides more autonomy for managers, as they are not reliant on the finance department to produce the figures. It also allows cross-pollination between disciplines. “Different departments, such as our environmentalists and engineers, can view the same data and have access to it for analysis purposes.”

Gympie Eldorado has also taken advantage of being able to add additional Greentree modules, by acquiring HR and Occupational Health & Safety.

“On the whole, we believe the Greentree product will keep growing and expanding to meet the needs of the business,” Higgins says.

For more information

www.greentree.com/customers/profiles/gympie.cfm

Graham Hill
Greentree International
Ph: 0800 313 313
Fax: 09 366 3889
graham.hill@greentree.com
www.greentree.com

July 2005

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