When software salespeople enthusiastically answer “yes” to pretty much every question you ask does it make you feel sceptical about what their offering can actually do and how much they intend developing from scratch?

More importantly, it’s probably occurred to you that your business could be footing the bill for development that could be rolled-out to every other customer?

Bryan Wentworth, accountant at Maskell Productions, found plenty of salespeople happy to develop ‘bill of materials’ and ‘job costing’ modules that met Maskell’s specific requirements but he says: “they all wanted an outrageous amount of money to develop from scratch” which is why he chose Greentree.

As far as Wentworth could see, “Greentree’s Bill of Materials and Job Cost modules were standard, requiring little tweaking with an attractive value for money price tag” so, getting any software company to develop these commonly-used modules from scratch simply wasn’t necessary.

The business situation
Maskell Productions engineers and fabricates below- and above-ground storage tanks for several industrial and commercial applications and thus has a significant materials and job costing component to every job it undertakes. Thirty five years ago, Maskell pioneered the innovative development of fibreglass for the containment, handling and treatment of corrosive chemicals and gases.

This effectively extended the useful life of the old steel storage tank from 12 years to 30 years for fibreglass which, on the face of it, seems counterproductive but in fact this has enabled Maskell to find broader application for their products across a wider range of related industries. This has driven the need for more sophisticated job costing requirements.

Standard modules with rich functionality
With more than 60 components all made-to-order, the Bill of Materials (BOM) is the ‘pulse’ of the manufacturing process. Its accuracy has flow-on implications for follow-on processes particularly Job Costing, Billing, Forecasting and ultimately impacts upon the bottom-line.

Job Costing was largely a manual process so Wentworth was particularly interested to see how BOM and Job Costing was handled by Greentree and he says the dynamic integration of Greentree automates a fair chunk of these dependent processes.

The free-flow of information through and around the entire system has enabled much greater visibility of costs as they happen which has improved the quality of information being captured, analysed and reported which ultimately improves the decision making process.

Value for money
After evaluating several offerings from various providers it got down to a “two-horse race” says Wentworth but the key drivers in the buy-decision by more than a ‘nose’ were definitely BOM and Job Cost with Greentree’s comparative value for money being the deal clincher.

“Comparatively speaking, Greentree is very good value since it provides all Maskell required for a fraction of the cost of any other provide”.

Little risk to continuity
The amount of work involved in a new system implementation is a key concern for any small to medium sized enterprise and Wentworth says they were meticulous about checking references and basically doing their homework before making the final decision.

Having experienced the new systems implementation ‘journey’ a number of times, Wentworth says that at the end of the day, Maskell had to answer the question “who were these people and what risk might we be exposing the business to should we decide to implement Greentree?”

Like any other manufacturing business wholly dependent on job costing and ensuring the right materials are available to complete a job, downtime is simply not an option.

Smooth transition from old to new
Working closely with a Greentree partner, Wentworth says the changeover was hardly noticed by customers and staff found Greentree very easy to learn with its familiar windows environment.

The transfer of data from the old system to the new was done over a period of planned time with constant comparisons of data to ensure that everything that used to happen in the old system was running smoothly and exactly as expected in Greentree.

Wentworth expects Greentree to accommodate business growth for many years to come and has been impressed by the excellent support provided by the local Greentree partner..

For more information

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

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