The situation
Agriculture ITO is one of New Zealand’s largest industry training organisations, helping more than 10,000 people every year to gain the knowledge and skills needed for a productive career in agriculture.

At the hub of Agriculture ITO’s interaction (with over 26 training providers New Zealand-wide) is a training management system that interfaces with Agriculture ITO’s financial management information system (FMIS). Their aged Kypera FMIS system had few reporting tools, lacked security, and didn’t have the power to deliver new functionality to support their growing business needs.

The pain
Agriculture ITO needed to cull an ageing Kypera financial system in order to make significant strides in their reporting, budgeting and financial management functions.

Getting the lay of the land from a business sense Agriculture ITO (AgITO) went to the market for options, and according to finance manager, Pramod Nair, Intergen was the only potential partner that went to them pre-presentation to understand the business.

He comments: “Initially we didn’t have any knowledge of Microsoft Dynamics NAV and had been pursuing Finance1, until Intergen came to us pre-presentation – into our business world – to actually get an understanding of our business.”

“They were able to demonstrate NAV’s strengths and a number of successful NAV projects. By getting to know us first, we had a lot of confidence.”

“This proved to be well placed as they conducted a series of workshops upfront and had good buy-in from our key users. By working largely in our environment, the project unfolded on time and on budget.”

Hitting the ground running
Achieving new functionality to meet fairly standard financial processes was straightforward. The key challenge was ensuring that Agriculture ITO’s new financial platform integrated with their specialised training management system and this required a number of system interfaces to be designed and successfully tested.

By automating many of its financial processes, Agriculture ITO has significantly pared back a lot of manual processes. The process of making month-end payments to their training providers can now be completed in half a day, compared to three days under Kypera.

Reporting capabilities are enhanced, with the ability to cut and dice information proving to be extremely valuable for budgeting, forecasting and board reporting.

Pramod Nair comments: “Being able to load multiple information sources, the ability to prepare budgets and just the simplicity of easy templates for managers to use, are all delivering easier ways of working. Security has also been an important outcome for us – in the old days, information could be deleted and unrecoverable; now we have a very secure system and that’s important from an audit perspective.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION//

INTERGEN
W: www.intergen.co.nz








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