Toyota’s regional focus, global ambition

When Toyota embarked on a major investment in automotive engineering design through the creation of a Technical Design Centre for the Asia Pacific region, Star Business Solutions helped breathe life into its vision...

Toyota Technical Centre Asia Pacific Australia Pty Ltd boasts a $47m state-of-the-art design centre in Melbourne employing over 150 people and housing some of the most creative automotive design engineers in Australia.

The specialised operation is a key contributor to the development of innovative vehicle designs for Toyota’s global regional markets, as well as being involved in fine tuning models for the particular needs of Asia and Australia.

The challenge
The Toyota Technical Centre became fully operational after a year-long establishment phase of planning and intensive engineer training.

In order to meet the critical date of the launch of the business, the management team at Toyota Technical Centre required a new business system to “go-live” just ahead of launch.

They had temporarily been using a system “to just get the work done and to manage the basic financial figures” but a detailed selection process for a full business management system had been planned.

Kim Crosher, manager - accounting and finance, managed the selection process and looked at 10 different systems targeted at mid-sized businesses.

Greentree was included in the initial review and was short-listed to a final three. Crosher describes the review: “We had a thorough selection process to review our needs for the new business and delivered detailed criteria for the approval of our Australian and Japanese management.”

Crosher continues: “Greentree was found during an open day for business systems. Greentree was a 90 percent fit for what we wanted to achieve. There was a need for some modification specifically for our processes, which appeared easy to develop.”

Across-the-board automation
The management at Toyota Technical Centre had recognised a range of features of Greentree that they considered would give them the most benefits.

“We wanted to automate our processes across the board with Greentree, making our business seamless and reducing the paperwork. We believe Greentree is the answer for us,” Crosher says.

“Our other goals included improving month-end processing and our requisition process. Overall we wanted to automate our workload and get rid of time consuming paperwork, especially with regards to raising purchase orders and paying invoices.”

The Greentree implementation project was split into two phases with Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, General Ledger, Fixed Assets and Job Costing modules going live in January and Payroll for Greentree and Greentree’s full CRM suite implemented in July.

Crosher describes how they executed the implementation project.

“The training was rolled out as we put in the business rules behind the system to ensure the implementation and daily use of Greentree ran smoothly,” Crosher says.

“We feel the system will continue to expand and evolve, and will be accessed by more staff as our recruitment process continues.”

All the Toyota engineers based in Melbourne have access to their own timesheets in the system, plus there are over 20 staff from the management and finance teams accessing the Greentree financial and job costing modules.

Of particular importance was the ability for management to get a better picture of how the business is performing.

Crosher explains: “We were looking for strong job costing and project management and also required flexible reporting and a system that would deliver good controls to manage all our payment processes. Greentree easily met these requirements.” Greentree’s Job Costing module enables management of the team of 35 plus engineers.

“We need our engineers to time report on their projects and to collate and analyse labour costs and capture the hours worked. With over 35 engineers there is a high volume of data to process in Greentree. Plus Greentree allows our engineers to simply input their own time sheets in the system themselves.”

Star Business Solutions steps up
To meet the anticipated implementation deadline Greentree business partner Star Business Solutions worked closely with the team at Toyota Technical to deliver a flexible product and service offering.

Star Business Solutions is Greentree International’s most experienced and well-resourced business partner and value-added reseller and developer.

Star Business Solutions has been in partnership with Greentree since it began and has undertaken a number of development projects on behalf of Greentree that have become critical in developing Greentree’s total business solution. Star Business Solutions has received awards for Best Business Partner and Best Implementation of the Year.

“It has been really good working with the Greentree team,” says Crosher.

“The support team has been flexible and helpful when meeting our needs. They developed specific customisations that enabled the time reporting and timesheets to be exactly how we needed them. So far the overall Greentree experience has been really positive.

For more information
Star Business Solutions
www.StarBusinessSolutions.com.au
Ph (02) 9499 3377
or (03) 8415 8315
sales@star.cd

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