Sun Engineering has almost 800 staff in Australia, Papua New Guinea, China and Dubai involved in fabrication and construction for the mining, power, petrochemical and construction industries. Projects are large scale and complex involving heavy equipment, machinery and highly skilled staff carrying out work in remote places.

“When we sat down at board meetings and were presented with various reports, we could see straight away that the figures weren’t telling us the truth”, explains Michael Rodwell, Business Development Manager. In an attempt to connect the stand-alone accounting system to various financial and operational systems, a multitude of Excel spreadsheets had to be created to bridge the functionality gap. This resulted in the duplication of effort and generated a mountain of paper-work as staff spent hours entering and re-entering data.

“The local Greentree business partner undertook a comprehensive analysis of our business and made constructive suggestions for streamlining critical business processes. This translated into a best- fit Greentree solution which we know, will scale as required,” Michael says.

Decision making confidence restored
With little confidence in the figures appearing in company reports, management decision making had been stymied. The incumbent system had effectively stifled growth. However, Sun’s decision to choose Greentree clearly paid off.

Integration and a single data entry point have enabled a level of accuracy never before seen. Michael says, “Without doubt, Greentree has restored managerial confidence in the reporting process. This enables directors to take a strategic view of the business and make sound fiscal and operational decisions based on reliable information”. The overall improvement in the quality and standard of the decision making process has been “outstanding”.

100% growth, 0% admin increase, 0 redundancies
In fact, the impact of a coherent decision making process has enabled the organisation to grow from a $30 million company to a $60 million company in a few short years. Michael positively states that “this has been achieved without increasing administration costs and by transitioning data entry staff into purchasing roles without making anyone redundant”. Greentree’s extraordinary reporting capability, single-source data entry and integration have enabled workflow efficiencies “we only imagined were possible”.

Carbon footprint shrinks as paper wastage plummets 30%
The paper-war going on in offices across Sun Engineering was largely due to the contractual nature of the business environment. This created a propensity for staff to print documents which simply could not be viewed on a screen or easily distributed electronically. The environmental downside of this was to grow the organisation’s carbon footprint.

Since every staff member can now view the same business data from anywhere within Greentree, paper wastage has plummeted by 30%. A change in printing behaviour will ensure the company’s carbon footprint will continue to shrink. Sun Engineering acknowledges the significance of this issue now and in the future.

Approvals & Alerts transforms purchasing into ‘best practise’ “When a vehicle was required urgently on-site in China, the process for requisitioning a replacement was about as efficient as sending smoke signals”, says Michael. But Greentree’s Approvals and Alerts now enforces, a more disciplined approach to purchasing.

For example, “If a replacement vehicle is required onsite in Papua New Guinea but must be purchased in Australia and the authorising person is in Dubai, an alert pops-up on that person’s screen. The authority is sent electronically without a single page of paper being printed, which is magical”.

“Approvals and Alerts have transformed purchasing into a structured, secure, best practise process the whole organisation has absolute confidence in. This alone, has reduced our carbon footprint by 30%”, Michael says.

The future
Greentree enables the Sun Engineering group of companies to be consolidated without the need for third party systems. This bodes well for its ambitious growth strategy which will involve acquisition of other companies in the future. The local implementation partner will continue to provide the critical systems knowledge required to constantly suggest better ways of doing things, whilst Greentree has restored confidence in the reporting tools required to support strategic decision making. The company has an optimistic confidence about its future, at a time when others are swimming against the tide.

For more information

Greentree
Graham Hill, Channel Manager
Email: graham.hill@greentree.com
Ph: 09 366 3888
Fax: 09 366 3889
Web: www.greentree.com

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