Greentree makes the right connection for Leap Australasia

When Leap Australasia’s managing director, Jay Wester, purchased his company in 2002, he went in search of a flexible solution that would support his ‘remote office’ strategy – and would also be easy and cost effective to sustain...

Headquartered in Wellington, with 10 offices in Australia, Leap Australasia manufactures and distributes market leading piping systems for plumbing and civil applications.

Established in 1989, the company was the first to break into the Australian plumbing market – a market firmly held by copper based products – with a polybutylene plumbing system.

Doing so required innovative development to achieve compliance with rigorous Australian standards, yet the reward was that Leap Australasia gained a market advantage of around five years on their competitors. 

As a result the company's ground breaking product range has been used in a number of high profile projects, including the Melbourne Crown Casino and the Endeavour replica sailing ship.

Windows a must
Leap Australasia used CBA accounting software from Greentree (who were recently recognised as one of 25 global rising stars by MIS magazine), from 1989 until 1999, when their UK parent company installed a Tier 1 financial product.

Unfortunately however, the tier-1 product was difficult to maintain due to being non-Windows based and Leap Australasia accounts staff found its modules cumbersome and difficult to learn.

The system also didn't effectively support remote data entry, a key requirement for the company's Australian offices. As the hardware platform required to maintain the system was also costly, Leap Australasia were forced to abandon their remote site access strategy and deploy multiple servers.

Ownership change drives review
In 2002, managing director Jay Wester purchased Leap Australasia from its UK based parent. He quickly abandoned the tier-1 product and went in search of a flexible solution that would better suit his company's remote office strategy.

Wester rediscovered Greentree, and when he compared it to other tier-2 ERP solutions he found it offered the functionality he needed, strong thin client capability for remote offices, and used industry standard Microsoft Excel for financial reporting and analysis.

Wellington based Greentree business partner Datacom was selected and with business issues pressing, Wester gave them just six weeks to implement both the software and hardware solution. He 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 very surprised as I thought it could easily stretch out for three months."

Delivering on the vision
According to Wester, the key attributes of success after the implementation have been Greentree's reliability, support for remote access from Australian offices (from Perth to Darwin and North Queensland), and its ease of use.

"Because it's Windows menu driven our storemen find it really simple to use," he says. "The setup of the screen can be customised for each individual storeman and they can change the icons they want to see, the size of the columns, and even the position of the columns. After that they just save their personal settings and that's the screen that greets them every time they log in. To top it off I can access the system from wherever I am."

Perhaps the greatest leap ahead with the new system, says Wester, is Greentree's management reporting.

"We're now using the pivot table and charting capabilities to analyse our sales and profitability effectively," he says. "This approach to intelligent reporting allows us to see more and in a different light. For example you can choose which product category you want to see and which customer you want to see and the system will only display that information."

With 24 users, Wester says these features were an added bonus he hadn't thought of. "Pivot tables connected with Greentree are an excellent way of analysing information and for the first time in my 20 years of accounting I've seen the sales figure on the sales analysis report equal what's on the general ledger report. That's something I've never seen happen before." 

Sleeping well with secure hosting
After a cost analysis following the attempted theft of their previous server, Leap Australasia has opted to have their system hosted at Datacom's secure data centre.

"A guy had broken in and was running down the road with our server under his arm when the security company caught him," says Wester. "We didn't lose any information, but it became crystal clear to us then just how valuable that data was."

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

Furthermore, Leap Australasia requires a 24x7 support service, which Datacom are able to deliver, as the company must allow for the five hour time difference between offices in Wellington and Perth.

Commenting on the future direction of his company, Wester says he'll be adopting more Greentree modules.

"We plan to add the Webstore suite to provide internet ordering capabilities for customers in the very near future," he says.

As many of Leap Australasia's customers are large this will also allow them to completely automate the processing of their purchase orders, resulting in packing slips being printed in the warehouse automatically - and a reduction in manual handling.

At latest report, the company was also considering the addition of the Greentree customer relationship management suite to enhance their sales and marketing capabilities.

For more information:

www.hepworth.co.nz (Leap Australasia)

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

Graham Hill
Greentree
Phone: 1800 000 737
Email: graham.hill@greentree.com
www.greentree.com

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