Family-owned Auckland aggregate company McCallum Bros. Ltd is the leading supplier of sand and red rock to major ready-mix concrete manufacturers, who supply concrete for commercial, industrial and domestic construction use across the Auckland region. McCallum Bros also supplies sand for equestrian arenas, sports field maintenance, beach replenishment and landscaping.

Their red rock can be seen throughout New Zealand and is identifiable by its characteristic warm red look.

Jane Chandler, the company’s administration manager, explains that deliveries to their major customers are on a continuous supply basis and not necessarily a costed job with a one-off delivery date.

The systems she looked at treated each delivery as a complete job and raised an invoice accordingly but this simply didn’t fit with how the business operated. She says the flexibility to list multiple deliveries on one invoice, without it needing to be a completed job, could only be found in Greentree and this was a key factor.

Chandler says that “the flexibility of Greentree’s invoicing alone was good enough reason to make the decision to implement it and our directors, customers and accounts staff are extremely happy with that decision”.

Another key factor was business growth which had brought the old Attaché system to its knees and when the directors couldn’t get the reporting information they needed to inform the decision making process, Chandler contacted Endeavour Solutions, the local Greentree partner. She recalled previous contact with Endeavour which left her with a positive lasting impression.

Constructive process suggestions
Chandler recalls that the Endeavour consultants went to considerable lengths to ensure they understood McCallum Bros’ business needs. They captured vital information related to basic setup requirements via a questionnaire rather than depend on memory. With the experience of several implementations under her belt, Chandler was “very comfortable with the process” which she says was very well explained. She was also impressed by the fact that Endeavour was quick to suggest how Greentree could be better configured to handle some of the non-standard operational characteristics of the business.

Training pitched at the right level
Attention to McCallum Bros business needs didn’t fall away post-implementation as is often the case. Chandler says training has been wonderful and help from the support desk is also excellent. They’re also mindful of the fact that not everyone wants to develop complex reporting when they’re still finding their way around the rich features and functionality Greentree offers. “Endeavour cater for me doing as little or as much as I want when it comes to developing the reporting or they can do it for me – it’s my choice.”

“I have been to a few of the reporting courses that Endeavour run and have found the course content excellent and the knowledge of the person running the course great. It has absolutely been at my level,” she says.

Confident go-live
When the decision was made to implement Greentree, a go-live date was set and Chandler confidently states they didn’t run a parallel system because the old system wasn’t integrated so attempting to compare data in the integrated Greentree system was pointless.

Another key factor was that Greentree’s best practice and integrated environment meant that business reporting would be so fundamentally different to the way they had been doing things that again, there was little point in running the two systems in parallel.

Once all the business data was entered into Greentree, it was live from day one without any disruption to business continuity.

Chandler explains how in the previous invoicing process, “we used to do one computerised invoice on Attaché with a manual list of all of the delivery dockets that related to it. This had to be done on a batch-type basis at the end of month so this process took quite a few days and we probably weren’t getting our invoices and statements out until about the 10th working day.

Greentree allows us the flexibility to add delivery dockets to a ‘live’ invoice throughout the month so now we get them out by about the second working day.”

This has had a positive flow-on effect to cash management. Chandler says they adapted job costing to track and analyse direct costs associated with each individual truck. Aside from demonstrating Greentree’s flexibility, she says this adaptation has been invaluable in ensuring that all costs occurred whilst undertaking core business activities are reported. This is extremely helpful in asset management and presenting an accurate view of direct business related costs.

Simply superior reporting
Business growth was driving a need for more sophisticated levels of reporting and Chandler says extracting the data to produce reports was extremely difficult in the old system.

She says: “I love how I can drag and drop data into Excel” and this has enabled her to produce timely and accurate reports for the directors at any time since the information in Greentree is always available and up-to-the-minute.

Apart from this, she’s able to produce reports in a meaningful format which everyone understands and the adaptation of Job Costing to track and report truck costs raises the bar on accuracy so management can rely on the figures for a multitude of strategic decisions. Chandler believes that the true measure of system flexibility is the ability to report on data in many formats, and as far as she’s concerned, Greentree supports that belief.

She reckons Greentree has been a very easy system for staff to learn and even a staff member with 30 years service who was initially “petrified and required a little hand-holding” now doesn’t want to think about how things used to be done and the amount of time spent on time-consuming monotonous tasks.

Greentree has streamlined and automated the invoice process whilst eliminating hundreds of hours of manual data processing. Management and the directors have the level of reporting required to make confident decisions about McCallum Bros continuing reputation as a key supplier to Auckland’s infrastructure customers.

In Chandler’s words: “Greentree has assisted us in making key strategic business decisions which have increased our market share.”

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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