The solution behind the style

As it continued its Australian success story, European appliance importer and distributor Technika found its progress being restrained by its ageing ERP system. Incoming financial controller Trevor Porter, decided it was time to look for a new solution...

Victoria-based Technika imports high quality home appliances from Italian manufacturers and distributes them around Australia via a wide retail partner network backed up by nationwide service teams. Its appliances include ovens, dishwashers and range-hoods - and while their European styling and innovative tooling sets Technika products apart, economies of scale make them affordable for Australian consumers.

As a result the company has built up a solid reputation, and Technika products are frequently included as part of the appliance package when builders sell new homes.

Behind the scenes, however, the company’s success was creating issues in the back office. As Technika’s incoming financial controller, Trevor Porter inherited a system that could no longer effectively manage the business’s requirements.

Historically Technika had used a system that was designed chiefly for point of sale, but experiencing growth and being importers and distributors, the company needed much more. Porter began the search for not just an integrated, enterprise wide system with comprehensive performance, but also a flexible systems delivery partner to handle the implementation and support.

Smooth lines of transition
Porter had been through the process of implementing a new financial system before and knew that getting the right systems integration partner was the key to success.

Technika considered several competing vendor systems, one of which was Greentree, demonstrated by local partner Endeavour (one of Australia’s largest resellers of Greentree accounting and business software). Porter liked what he saw “Endeavour went the extra mile to understand our requirements,” he says, “and we felt confident they would be in it for the long-haul”. The change-over was a big undertaking. “We had a lot of stock that we had to transfer across and we had our own way of doing things,” Porter says. Having made the move from CBA to Greentree in his previous company, Porter says he was confident about the project, but nonetheless he was impressed with Technika’s smooth transition and the speed at which the new system went live.

“The main thing is the business didn’t suffer at all,” he says. “Endeavour handled it seamlessly and we were clearly in good hands from the word go.” Initial fears that minor teething troubles might go unanswered by Technika’s implementation partner proved unfounded, “Endeavour have been very responsive with a ‘hands on’ approach to service and support,” says Porter.

With the transition coming in within budget, the company even decided to buy a number of extra modules that weren’t originally planned for - with Technika now using Greentree’s accounts payable, accounts receivable, inventory, multiple warehouses, foreign exchange, advance purchase orders, general ledger and analytics.

Staff resistance to Greentree evaporated as soon as the team experienced the product first hand. “There were a couple of people who didn’t want the change,” says Porter, “but after they had settled in and found out how good the system was, they would never go back to the old one.”

He says staff like Greentree because of its userfriendliness and because it provides a lot more information than they were used to. For instance, Technika was previously only able to do trial balances year to date, whereas now they can also run them month to date. “In our previous system,” Porter explains, “70% of the job was done in the accounting software, but then it had to be downloaded and finished off in Excel. Endeavour have worked closely with us to maximise the benefits of the integration capabilities of Greentree.

I find it absolutely magnificent as far as reports go, and also for direct costing. It’s also very accurate for doing invoices and Profit and Loss reports, and the warehouse control is very good.”

Confident in the detail
Previously, Technika’s warehouses in Queensland and Western Australia had to send spreadsheets detailing their stock holdings, so inaccurate stock reports were a problem.

“We
used to raise orders,” says Porter, “but when someone went out to the warehouse the item wouldn’t be there. And then, if an invoice had already been prepared, you couldn’t cancel it.”

As a result Technika had to create a credit note and then re-invoice. With the Greentree system, however, he says this can’t happen anymore. “Now we can’t sell negative stock and have to find out why there’s no stock showing, so Greentree is a great tool for stock control,” he says. These days, Porter can see stock holdings day-to-day on his own computer. Another positive upshot of the new solution, he says, is that users feel a lot more confident in their jobs because of the information they can access. “When we installed Greentree we knew we wanted better control of stock and more accurate management reporting. We’ve got big companies who have a lot of stores nationally set up as parent companies with child accounts. Now we can run integrated reports that let us see sales in individual stores. Pulling out single-store figures in the previous system was just horrendous.”

Porter has also seen a lot of time saving, especially in account receipting. “We’ve got some rather big clients who pay us over a million dollars a month, and to process those receipts in the old system took sometimes a day and a half.

We can finish them in a couple of hours now.” With productivity and integration maximised, Porter says Technika expect more good things from Greentree. “We made the right choice,” he says, “we’ve had great return on investment and I expect we’ll be able to do so much more in the future.”

For more information

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

Technika, www.technika.com.au

Endeavour, www.endeavour.co.nz

Graham Hill
(09) 366 3897
graham.hill@greentree.com
www.greentree.com

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