Sun Engineering sees the light with Greentree suite

Sun Engineering is bucking the global trend with its ambitious growth strategy, but it found it was being constrained by its antiquated accounts system that badly needed an upgrade. It found a new, integrated solution with blueStar’s help…

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

The company’s standalone accounting system simply couldn’t cope with the sophisticated needs of this far-flung company. A multitude of Excel spreadsheets were being used to connect the standalone accounting system to various financial and operational systems and bridge the functionality gap. The result was massive duplication of effort and the generation of mountains of paperwork, as staff spent hours entering and re-entering data. Nor was the company getting the financial “truth” with this bolted-together system.

“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,” says Michael Rodwell, business development manager. With little confidence in the figures appearing in company reports, management decision-making was being stymied. The incumbent system was effectively
stifling growth. It was time to look at a new system. Enter blueStar Business Solutions with its Greentree suite.

Benchmarking critical processes
Rodwell initially found it sobering to deal with a business solution provider who was prepared to tell him exactly what lay ahead. From the outset, he was aware that to ensure Sun Engineering was best placed for future growth there would be lots of work involved in benchmarking critical business processes such as purchasing.

“The consultants at blueStar undertook a comprehensive analysis of our business and made constructive suggestions for streamlining critical business processes. This translated into a best-fit Greentree solution that we know will scale as required,” says Rodwell.

The result has been an integrated system with a single data entry point that has enabled a level of accuracy never seen before, says Rodwell. “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, adds Rodwell.

Hundred percent growth
In fact, the impact of a coherent decision-making process has enabled the organisation to grow from a $30 million to a $60 million company in a few short years. Rodwell states positively 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 once only imagined were possible.”

Paper wastage plummets 30 percent
The paper war going on in offices across Sun Engineering was largely due to the contractual nature of the business. 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 the organisation’s carbon footprint was growing. But now, since every staff member can now view the same business data from anywhere within Greentree, paper wastage has plummeted by 30 percent. A change in printing behaviour that will ensure the company’s carbon footprint will continue to shrink.

Purchasing ‘best practice’
“When a vehicle was urgently required on-site in China, the process for requisitioning a replacement was about as efficient as sending smoke signals,” says Rodwell. Greentree’s ‘Approvals and Alerts’ now enforce a more disciplined approach to purchasing.

For example, “If a replacement vehicle is required on-site in Papua New Guinea, but needs to be purchased in Australia and the authorising person is in Dubai, an alert pops up on that [Dubai] person’s screen. The authority is also sent electronically, without a single page being printed, which is magical,” says Rodwell.

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

Growing ambitions
Greentree has enabled the Sun Engineering group of companies to consolidate without the need for third party systems. This bodes well for Sun’s ambitious growth strategy, which will involve acquiring other companies in the future. And blueStar will continue to provide the critical systems’ knowledge needed to develop better ways of doing things. While Greentree, having restored managers’ confidence in the reporting tools required to support strategic decision-making, will ensure Sun remains optimistic about the future at a time when many others are hunkering down.





> Greentree International
Graham Hill
P: 1800 000 737
E: graham.hill@greentree.com
W: www.greentree.com






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