In businesses all over the world, computers capture every detail about millions of customer transactions every second of every day. But when multiple disparate systems can’t talk to each other and you’re relying on mere mortals to recall the details about some transactions then chances are charges will get forgotten.

This was exactly the situation at Colbeck and Gunton (C & G) – a marine and industrial insulation company that was struggling with a disconnected system which relied a lot upon super-human memory to recall all the costs associated with any given customer transaction.

As Alexis Heffernan, administration manager at C & G explained: “we didn’t really know if we were recovering all the costs associated with a customer’s job so we weren’t entirely happy about the accuracy of our job costing process.”

Heffernan says the key priorities for a new system were improving the accuracy and integrity of job costing by factoring out reliance on selective human memory when it came to recalling all the costs associated with jobs.

Super-integration means knowing every cost is accounted for
Heffernan says there were no linkages in the old system which meant the business was relying heavily on linking Excel spreadsheets to perform a number of key business activities such as job costing, inventory and purchasing which were all manual processes.

Manual processes inherently require human intervention to complete tasks and this is where Greentree’s integration has made a huge difference for C & G according to Heffernan.

“The simplicity of being able to call all costs into a job or report is outstanding and we no longer rely on someone’s memory – nothing gets missed.”

Open data formats make company restructure easy
To make life even more interesting Heffernan says they recently went through a company re-structure and this really tested the flexibility and adaptability of Greentree.

She says: “Greentree handled the transition of data from the old to the new structure surprisingly well – it was pretty easy and went without too much fuss.”

Confidence in the integrity of the decision making process
Quotes are based on the recorded historical actual costs from previously completed jobs, so when costs are forgotten or hidden management can only work with what they have, which may not be the full picture. Given that job costing is a key business activity at C & G it has a direct impact on competitiveness and profitability and this is another area in which Greentree has made a real difference.

Management and staff responsible for costing jobs are now confident that the decisions they’re making are based upon a complete set of information about previously completed jobs. The integrity of the job cost process has greatly improved.

The local Greentree partner worked closely with Colbeck and Gunton to implement Greentree and Heffernan says they continue to provide very good ongoing support which is often hard to come by these days.

The next phase will be to get Greentree Quoting up and running and Heffernan is looking forward to demonstrating to management more of Greentree’s broad and deep business advantage..

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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