Armflame competes for opportunities

The business scenario

Poised for future growth, John Todd, CFO , is looking to consolidate some early efficiency gains now that Greentree has had time to bed down. Experimentation has evolved into expertise with the Greentree tools, and he now has a vision of how much more he can achieve. Central Queensland’s vibrant utilities sector is presenting growth opportunities that John is resolute about pursuing.

Greentree better value for money than SAP,
Navision & Australian-based Pronto

When John and his team of eight in-house ERP evaluators invited product demonstrations from Greentree, SAP and Pronto, Greentree emerged as the stand-out performer on a number of key factors. He states that, on the face of it, most of the suppliers could provide all or some of the functionality required; however, one wasn’t integrated with payroll at all, and the others were too costly, lacked the ability to be quickly deployed, or the demonstrators simply couldn’t connect with the evaluators. Greentree stacked up as simple to use when compared to its mid-market rivals, with comparative if not greater functionality at a fraction of the expected cost, presenting a surprising lower total cost of ownership.

Quote accuracy improves as job cost admin plummets

At Armflame, job costing is a ‘lifeblood’ activity and its accuracy directly impacts the bottom-line. John explains how previously, quotes that convert to a job then an invoice needed to be re-keyed multiple times e.g. into the payroll, purchase orders and creditors systems. The scope for human error and inaccuracy was significant. Integration and a single data entry point mean there’s no longer double and triple handling of data. This has resulted in a significant drop in administration and John cites an example, “Our Payroll Officer has cut back from 40 hours per week to 32.5 hours per week, a saving of 18.75% in time. However, she still processes everything that she did beforehand.”

HR Skills matrix simplifies complex tender certification requirements

Previously, skills and certification requirements information was manually maintained in spreadsheets, making the capture of job costing information for a job with one sub-job level a challenge. This made it hard for Armflame to compete for more complicated jobs.

John utilised Greentree’s ‘look-ups’ functionality to automatically include certification information in tender documents. This satisfies strict compliance and drug-screening requirements for onsite staff including Project Managers & Estimators. Information is presented in a simple matrix format to help quickly ascertain who would be on-site and whether they meet certification requirements. This has enabled Armflame to prove they have the skills vital for winning more sophisticated jobs.

Job Costing functionality simplifies complex multi-tiered job management

With up to 100 jobs with five levels of sub-jobs in progress at any time, Greentree’s Job Cost functionality enables easy capture and calculation of job costs. For example, John says, “Currently, we are doing one project for $3.7m with 5 levels of sub-jobs. This simply wouldn’t be possible prior to Greentree.”

Sub-Job summation report cuts through the clutter

To help further simply the multi-job management process, John cleverly leveraged Greentree’s ODBC to create the non-standard Sub-Job Summation report. This presents summary information only, with the option to drill down for more detail. This enables project managers to avoid information overload by viewing only what they need to know.

Purchase Order Expediting report

John continued to hone his skills using Greentree’s flexible report writer, by developing a new Purchase Order Expediting report from scratch. He explains that this report shows which orders are outstanding and allows the procurement team to chase these vital supplies, to ensure work doesn’t come to a grinding halt. Downtime simply isn’t an option and could be potentially very costly in terms of money and reputation.

Greentree Business partner comes-up with the right answers

John works on a philosophy that computing is 10% training and 90% experimentation, and reckons that on occasion, one needs a commando-like attitude to find the answers you’re looking for. He concedes that when he can’t, he calls upon the expertise of the local Greentree Business partner to hunt down and surrender the answers that eluded him. John is convinced that experimentation coupled with expert help from the Greentree Business partner is the best way to maximise the return on investment in Greentree.

Future Plans – Scheduled maintenance and Greentree IQ*

John is looking forward to the opportunity of moving the scheduling of maintenance from a reactive to a proactive process. Implementation of Greentree’s Maintenance module will release Armflame from dependence on expensive third party systems. He’s also looking forward to Greentree IQ* which, layered on top of Greentree, will enable him to extract even more insights for the purpose of management reporting efficiency. Without doubt, John has consolidated some early gains and his enthusiasm for Greentree is propelling the organisation toward a solid growth-oriented future.