Palfinger lifts their game with Greentree automation

The giant crane company has lifted its game Down Under by automating accounting for its huge parts distribution business for the first time...

Founded in 1932, Palfinger is an Austrian crane company with a major New Zealand and Australian presence.

The multinational company is a giant, with 30 percent market share and is one of the world’s biggest crane manufacturers. However, Palfinger Australia was still using manual accounting for the distribution of thousands of parts – which it had been doing for years. It definitely needed an upgrade.

Although its manual system was still working just fine, the management team could see that as the business was growing it was starting to place unsustainable pressures on manual systems and processes.

A specific problem was the number of people needed to update price lists – of, potentially, 40,000 line items of inventory.

This just wasn’t physically possible. Management also saw this would eventually diminish productivity and constrain growth.

The big transition
To accommodate future growth, and mitigate the impact of automation on both business processes and staff, the company’s management needed a big capacity system. It also had to be capable of growing over time.

Palfinger’s chief financial officer, Jan Downey, was well aware that transitioning the organisation from a manual to a computerised environment would be a much bigger task than upgrading from an existing computerised system to another one.

It would mean working closely with a specialised implementation and service support partner, as well as choosing the right software solution.

Local software provider blueStar Business Solutions was chosen. Not just because the company happened to be on the doorstep – that was a bonus – but because it had a wealth of proven infrastructure industry experience.

The accounting solution chosen was Greentree – for its ability to update large volume price lists.

The need to be able to do this was actually the key driver in Palfinger Australia’s decision to make the quantum leap from a manual to an automated system.

A staged approach was decided upon and the logical place to start was inventory management – a core business activity.

Inventory savings
“blueStar recommended Greentree to us because of its capacity to, potentially, update prices of up to 40,000 line items of inventory” says Downey.

Although the company isn’t actually updating that many items, there are actually that many items that could be ordered if need be.

Currently, we are carrying between 7,000 –10,000 items and these warranted some serious attention, says Downey.

Manual stock-taking was time-consuming, since staff worked from one paper file.

This was, not surprisingly, error-prone and one big improvement with Greentree is that it’s helping trap and prevent errors. It has also made it quicker and easier to identify stock discrepancies.

This has helped to highlight areas of the inventory management process that needed tidying and tightening.

The company has seen immediate benefits, with improvements in data accuracy and process timesavings. Less time is being spent physically monitoring stock, so staff now spend more time on improving business processes.

“blueStar worked closely with us to help us maximise the enormous potential of Greentree” says Downey.

Reporting and analysis of stock figures have also provided some real time savings, she adds. Now historical information is available at her fingertips. This helps her to identify and analyse trends and anomalies.

Previously, Downey says, she had to pull out and examine numerous paper files. This was tedious and time-consuming.

She has also seen a time reduction in the summary reporting of stock figures, since she no longer needs to manually total figures – Greentree automatically calculates these for her.

Easier invoicing
Integration has made it much easier and quicker to generate an invoice from inventory and complete the end-ofmonth process.

Palfinger has even leveraged blueStar’s knowledge of Greentree to have invoicing set up exactly the way the company wants.

“Our customers have benefited from a streamlined and automated end-to-end process, which means they get simpler more accurate invoices,” says Downey. Having local support is also paying dividends in terms of saved time too.

“Having the same consultant reduces the amount of time we need to spend explaining our business requirements and this makes a big difference to us,” explains Downey.

“We occasionally need extra support from blueStar and together we always find the best solution, and a happy way forward,” she continues, “blueStar provided good training, as well as the consistency of an experienced and reliable consultant.

This has helped us lay the foundation for confidence in a good ongoing partnership in the future.”

“Greentree and blueStar together have provided us with the right tools to manage our core business activity, with lots of future capacity. This has also enabled us to improve our business processes, which have benefited from refinement,” says Downey.

Just in time
Last but by no means least, Downey says the company probably implemented Greentree just in time, as Palfinger has grown since it first went live.

She concedes that it simply wouldn’t have been physically possible to manage the business’ inventory and personnel had the company persisted in using a manual system.

“Greentree has scaled to match our growth, and we expect this to keep on happening over the coming months and years,” says Downey.

For more information

Graham Hill
1800 000 737
graham.hill@greentree.com
www.greentree.com

updated on 9/3/8_ex_h_nl

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