Gerrard Murphy Plumbing taps business opportunities and workflow efficiencies

Moving to a central CRM hub using Greentree has allowed this service-focused business to overhaul its systems with dramatic results...

Gerrard Murphy Plumbing has over 40 years of expertise in commercial, industrial and domestic plumbing and maintenance services, and has built a reputation on its ability to deliver good old fashioned service.

Growth is exciting for any business but, as Gerrard Murphy Plumbing finance director Mark Murphy discovered, systems and processes often struggle to keep up with the excitement.

The situation
Aside from beefing-up business systems, Murphy realised that to really maximise the company’s business growth potential a cultural change in focus was needed.

He also realised he couldn’t implement the changes required alone, so sought help from local Greentree partner GT Business Solutions.

Having worked with GT Business for over 10 years, Murphy had great confidence in their experience and knowledge of best business practice and agreed with their view that getting the correct business rules wrapped around the best-fit system is the optimal path to cost and work flow efficiency.

Greentree was chosen to migrate the business to a best practice environment whilst GT Business provided the knowledge, expertise and guidance the company required to evolve from a cost-cutting focus to maximising sales and pursuing opportunities.

Murphy envisaged a central focus around CRM to enable service requests to be automatically generated and populated with customer information so data wasn’t re-keyed. Basically, he wanted to improve workflows across the business starting with maintenance which contributed 40 percent of sales but generated a whopping 80 percent of administration.

Improving workflows and cash-flow
Previously, all data was manually coded to maintenance or service requests and the accounts staff needed to remember pricing for individual customers. Accepted quotes needed to be manually converted into a job, then an invoice which clogged the Accounts Receivable process. Murphy says it was taking two weeks to get 300 to 400 invoices out to customers which had negative implications for cash-flow.

Nowadays, maintenance and service jobs are an integrated part of CRM which provides a single data entry point from where information flows through the relevant Greentree modules – no need to re-key data and

Greentree’s Price Book automatically pulls-in pricing. Maintenance is now an entirely proactive process where plumbers can enter all the information about a customer including with scheduled asset maintenance, special requirements using Alert text, dates and times and basically forget about it. A quote can be automatically converted into a job, then an invoice.

Faster turn-around of invoicing has positive direct impact on cash-flow and this has been further enhanced by a debt collection module which helps the company monitor outstanding debtors and keep much tighter control of the credit process. Management state that this has dropped a week off cash-flows and cleared the invoice logjam. Invoices are now turned-out in three days instead of two weeks.

‘Set and Forget’ efficiencies
Murphy says Greentree’s ability to provide a link to productivity tools such as Microsoft Word enables additional notes to accompany a GT Business-customised Service Request and Risk Assessment sheet.

With full, editable and accurate information automatically populating relevant forms, quality and control are inherent parts of the maintenance process. Four manual tasks for each job have now been automated.

“Greentree’s Maintenance module enables us to basically ‘set and forget’ service contract or maintenance scheduling tasks – this alone has reduced our administration time by at least 30 percent. We’ve also saved thousands of dollars in paper and printing with major improvements in the flow and accuracy of information. Plus, there’s the feel-good factor of saving a few hundred trees,” he says.

CRM has further enhanced customer communications by enabling Murphy Plumbing to add notes to customer records which can be emailed via Outlook and shared across both the residential and commercial areas of the business. This means that everyone has access to the same information which reduces errors, saves time and eliminates duplication of effort.

Murphy says that although the core business is plumbing, part of the growth strategy is diversification and Greentree provides the flexibility to manage business interests outside of Murphy Plumbing.

Currently he manages 16 commercial tenancies, two self-managed super funds and two Subway franchisees within Greentree. This effectively circumvents the need to purchase dedicated third party systems and demonstrates Greentree’s value as a strategic business management tool as opposed to an accounting system.

Murphy speaks highly of the tenacious commitment of the GT Business team, who worked tirelessly as an integral part of the Murphy Plumbing team from the beginning. Since implementing Greentree, a number of key business processes have been “tidied and tightened” and GT Business was the key driver of those improvements.

Murphy concedes that he wasn’t so inclined to improve the old system since there didn’t seem to be any real benefits.

“GT Business came up with some useful customisations which have made progressive, overdue improvements. These have effectively squeezed unnecessary costs and manual processes out of the business,” he says.

Proactive business management
With CRM as the central hub for information flows, integrated financial reporting within Excel and the automation of manual processes, Gerrard Murphy Plumbing now have something unfamiliar to monitor – idle time.

Murphy admits they had no idea what this was in the old system but Greentree enables them to allocate resource and capacity which has resulted in more efficient utilisation of resources.

With the budgeting available in Greentree Financials, management now know how the business performed in the past but most importantly “we can now rely on our forecasting,” Murphy says. Management has the information to help guide strategic planning and decision making.

High visibility of business data enabled him to undertake another task he had little time for previously - managing the possibilities. As far as Murphy is concerned, Greentree will provide a sound and scalable platform for growth well into the future complemented by continuing open and honest business guidance and support from GT Business Solutions.

“Greentree’s integration and specifically, our use of CRM as our information hub and single data entry point, has effectively automated workflows from end-toend with significant savings in time and costs – we now spend time managing the possibilities Greentree has created for us,” Murphy says.

For more information

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

GT Business Solutions
464 King George’s Road
Beverly Hills NSW 2209
Phone: +61 2 9554 5000
Fax: +61 2 9554 5999
E-mail: info@gtbusiness.com.au

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