Mining: Gilbert Group hits pay dirt with Greentree deployment
A major supplier to the engineering and mining industries has found the move to a fully integrated system was worth its weight in gold...
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Gilbert Group (Qld) supplies over 500 world class products encompassing 36,000 items out of four regional centres to north Queensland’s biggest mining operations. The company also runs two 24/7 fully equipped hydraulic and mechanical engineering workshops which have helped to keep the massive Mt Isa mines operational for over a decade. When Gilbert Group made the decision to deploy a new accounting, finance and inventory management system the key driver behind the move was relatively simple, says Ryan Lacaze, the group’s financial accountant. “We needed one fully integrated Windows-based system that was easy to use and stable,” says Lacaze. Frustration with the error-prone DOS-based system the company had been using was another driver in the decision to move the business to one modern, easily audited system. Just over 18 months have gone by since Greentree went live at Gilbert Group and the company says it hasn’t looked back, with the implementation of Greentree's Approvals & Alerts module and add-on QlikView providing even greater business value. Easy period comparison and deeper analysis With 36,000 potential sale items on hand, sales analysis and reporting is a strategic business activity and a core part of the inventory management process. Lacaze says that sales analysis in the old system was “cumbersome” at best but since implementing QlikView for Greentree, comparison of the current sales period with the same historical sales period is now so much easier. Such a frequently performed task would have previously required a complex query to be constructed but this is now a thing of the past which translates into more time spent analyzing and a lot less time spent creating queries. Lacaze is looking forward to reaping similar business benefits when he starts using QlikView for inventory analysis and reporting. Email alerts save time and tempers Business continuity is a major issue for any well-run operation looking to anticipate and manage any system downtime in the most transparent way possible and to this end Gilbert Group implemented the new Greentree Approvals & Alerts module. Lacaze says this saves heaps of time since staff no longer need to manually check all systems are running because Approvals & Alerts sends an email message to the appropriate staff member giving him/her a status update or an alert when scheduled procedures don’t happen when they’re supposed to. “We used to have someone check the entire system at various times of the day which was such a time-consuming task but there’s no need to do this any more which is great - staff can get on with other essential tasks,” says Lacaze. “We’re greatly impressed with the other valuable time-saving benefits we’ve found in Greentree,” he adds. For more information www.greentree.com/customers/profiles/gilbert_group.cfm Graham Hill
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July 2007 To view a full version of this case study, click here (PDF 229kb)
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