Headquartered in Wellington, with 10 offices in Australia, Leap Australasia is a leading supplier of quality piping solutions for residential, industrial, and civil applications. Leap’s products include a range of innovative plumbing and civil products.

Some well-known projects undertaken to date include the Melbourne Crown Casino and the Endeavour Replica sailing ship. When the company launched its innovative polybutylene plumbing system into the Australian market, it leapfrogged its competitors by five years. In so doing, it tapped into a potential customer base of approximately 30,000 plumbers, not to mention architects, builders and inspectors.

The business situation
With the expansion across the Tasman, infrastructure costs to maintain the company’s legacy system were high and eventually the remote access strategy was abandoned and replaced with multiple servers. Leap managing director Jay Wester’s focus was on ditching the company’s existing tier-one system and replacing it with a totally cost-effective and flexible system that would enable remote access and easy data exchange between offices with significant CRM capability.

Delegating to juniors
Extracting data, performing reasonably complex analysis and producing customised reports using Excel management staff.

These tasks are simplified in Greentree and can be confidently delegated to the office junior whilst your senior accountant or financial controller is unleashed to perform more strategic tasks like using pivot tables to glean business intelligence from sales data.

Wester explains: “We’re now using the pivot table and charting capabilities to analyse our sales and profitability effectively.”

Wester says that being able to create templates and customised reports means that most of the data extraction and analysis groundwork for management reporting can be undertaken by a junior, which is much more efficient use of the accountant’s time and expertise.

Six weeks to implement
There are plenty of horror stories out there about how long and perilous an implementation process can be and many sceptics suggest the CIO/CTO should pick a time frame, double it then multiply by three and you might come close.

On this occasion, the sceptics were silenced when the Greentree business partner Capital IT, implemented both software and hardware, and also trained all the staff within six weeks.

Capital IT specialise in providing software and service solutions to small to medium businesses. Their main focus is the implementation and support of Greentree financial and business management software.

Wester admits he was somewhat taken aback when things came in on deadline.

“To be honest, six weeks is an extremely short time to implement a changeover,” he says.

“But really, we had no problems at all. I was extremely surprised as I thought it could easily stretch out for three months – but no, the Capital IT team did it in six weeks just as they said they would.”

Impressive CRM capability
Wester explains that whilst the 37,000 or so plumbers in Australia and New Zealand are Leap’s primary audience, the company also needs to manage customer interactions with architects, builders and inspectors.

Leap provide consultancy services to architects, builders and new home owners which can include technical diagrams, engineers reports, and plans which can be uploaded to the CRM database.

Wester says that Leap staff use CRM as a central knowledge base and he says technical staff in particular, can get the information they want as it relates to individual customers.

Since Greentree’s integration ensures that financial information is linked to each customer’s records, everyone is accessing the same information but within their own customised unique view so they don’t need to waste time trying to figure stuff out.

Secure hosting for peace-of-mind
It’s not until your security company catches some guy running down the street with your server under his arm that the true value of your data ‘slaps you around the bank account’.

Leap now have their system hosted at a secure data centre.

“We didn’t lose any information, but it became crystal clear to us, just how valuable that data was,” says Wester.

Off-site hosting provides a number of benefits, he says, including the piece-of-mind of knowing their equipment and data is secure from theft and is backed up without the need for specialist IT staff on the Leap payroll.

Furthermore, Leap requires a round-the-clock support service, which Capital IT is able to deliver.

This is especially important since Leap needs to ensure the five-hour time difference between offices in Wellington and Perth doesn’t impact upon their customers.

“Capital IT have provided 24x7 support service dependability”, says Wester.

Stability and remote access support
Wester believes key factors in the success of the project post-implementation include the stability of the Greentree environment and remote access support from the Greentree partner.

This has meant the Leap offices aren’t waiting for answers to technology questions. And since the Australian offices are logged into the same central server as New Zealand, everyone is looking at the same information.

The future
The sustainability of energy is a globally significant issue, which has implications for Leap management as they tackle the challenges of renewable energy.

Wester is confident Greentree’s inherent flexibility will enable Leap to scale and make changes to the business model brought about by what he sees as inevitable legislative changes enforcing more efficient construction methods.

“Greentree and Capital IT have future-proofed our business by providing a sound business backbone meaning we won’t need to re-jig the back-office,” he says.

“Greentree will scale to meet the needs of tomorrow’s challenges as they happen.”

For more information:

www.hepworth.co.nz (Leap Australasia)

www.greentree.com/customers/profiles/leap_australasia.cfm

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

updated on 8/12/12_ex_m_h_nl

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