Global brand marketing management company SellAgence partners with client companies to design and apply the service elements required to maximise their category and brand growth in the New Zealand operating environment.

SellAgence has more than 95 full-time and part-time employees to service the New Zealand market and provides market management services for global brands, such as Procter & Gamble, Ferrero and Kodak, managing around $250 million in retail sales for clients.

It had been running a tier-one ERP system but needed to trim IT costs without reducing functionality.

Basically, SellAgence needed a system flexible enough to accommodate the business rules and processes of several business models within one business system. They also needed to reduce IT infrastructure costs by right-sizing IT systems and support with as little disruption to the business as possible. Greentree’s contortionist-like flexibility has scaled to meet those requirements with no trade-off in functionality with a surprising total cost of ownership.

Lower cost, reduced resource needs
A common view among some business decision makers is that in order to get all the functionality required to run the business, a more complex and inherently larger and more expensive system would be required. Not this time and Mark says, “Since Greentree was a good fit for our business with most of the functionality there from day one, we’re looking to drop a zero off the cost of ownership.” 

In addition to this, Mark explains how Greentree has enabled SellAgence to virtualise their ERP server environment on to VMware allowing them to consolidate the Production and Test environments on to one physical server. SellAgence have been able to scale their server requirements down from three  at $75K each to just one at $20K.

In terms of people resource, efficiency gains transcend the business as Database Administration (DBA) requirements which, Mark says he was responsible for, plummeted from 50% of his time to a bare minimum freeing him up to focus on progressive IT projects that supported business strategy. The full-time data analyst has just been trained to garner useful business insights and intelligence using Qlikview which enables data to be extracted in minutes instead of hours in the click of a button.

Batch processing, which used to take countless hours each month plummeted to 15 minutes to print invoices and 20 minutes to export data into Qlikview for reporting purposes. This also meant a huge workload was taken off the system and because Greentree is a ‘live’ environment, batch processing has become redundant.

A local expert Greentree partner
The Greentree partner provided amazing support and quickly grasped SellAgence business requirements. Mark explains that in actual fact they undertook two back-to-back implementations – the first to replicate SellAgence existing business processes which was completed within two months with no problems. The second was implementation of new business from Kodak which was also completed within two months with no problems. A recent upgrade took just one day and any customisation seems straightforward with no surprises.

"We had a tough job ahead of us with going live with Greentree followed hard on its heals by an introduction of a new client into the business. Fortunately we managed to do both successfully, due to the simplicity and speed that the Greentree implementation process allowed for" - Jenny Peploe, Chief Executive Officer at SellAgence.

Future projects that add more business value
Mark enthusiastically mentions planning projects which will add more value to the business over the coming months and years and he expresses confidence for the future of the business.

Projects which are in the pipeline include implementation of Greentree’s eXchange EDI module which will enable SellAgence to exchange order data with major suppliers such as Foodstuffs. Another related project currently being implemented is Webstore which will enable e-commerce at a fraction of the cost of other systems. Another exciting project involves PDA’s that SellAgence use to enforce in store compliance which Mark says will be integrated into Greentree in the near future.

Flexibility to enhance new business
The stand-out value of Greentree for Mark is its flexibility, particularly in relation to new business.
 
Adding Kodak to SellAgence business as easily as this was undertaken was reassuring and demonstrable evidence of Greentree’s ability to scale to future growth needs. As far as Mark is concerned, “Greentree has changed the world for SellAgence,” and he’s looking forward to implementing new projects which add value and enhance business efficiency.

"Greentree is user friendly, cost effective and flexible with a good level of functionality. Reporting made use of key existing financial spreadsheets that could be easily integrated directly into Greentree so the impact of implementing this system was kept to a minimum" - Barry Fallwell, Financial Director at SellAgence.

For more information:

www.sellagence.co.nz

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

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

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