H W Richardson distributing with Greentree

The original foundations of the company were based within the building industry, but over the last 30 years have grown to include Ready Mixed Concrete, Transportation, Fuel Distribution, Road Construction and Maintenance, as well as Sand, Aggregates and Lime supply.

Throughout this long heritage the progressive organisation has kept up with market demands, using a modern fleet of delivery vehicles and a strong focus on product development. Faced with changing business requirements in their Fuel Distribution operation, it felt rather than develop its existing business system CBA of 10 years, it was sensible to move to a new-generation product.

Joe O’Connell, Group Financial Controller, explains the features of Greentree that impressed him during a seminar, hosted by the Greentree Business Partner and Greentree International, and the subsequent evaluation period: “We were confident after the demonstrations that Greentree was the ideal system for our requirements.

“The flexibility with reporting stood out. The level of useful management information we can now produce is fantastic. We knew there were some areas of the product that weren’t going to fit and that we would require some customisation, but that would be the case whatever product we used going forward. These were needs that were very specific and unique to our petroleum business.”

Joe was able to draw a comparison with other systems on the market. “We evaluated three other products. The group had such an excellent run with CBA that we put our faith in Greentree to produce us the right product. These changes always carry with them a certain amount of risk; however we perceived the level of risk being lessened moving to Greentree than a competing product due to its close alignment with CBA. It was a very close fit, easily a 95% fit, apart from two business-specific customisations that no products we were able to find offered.”

Very, very, responsive!

Two months following this evaluation, the team implemented Greentree’s Financial Suite, with the Distribution suite. “The implementation went very well and the deadline was met. We did strike problems with the product after about a month that did take some time to resolve. However, the positive side to this was that Greentree worked really hard to overcome these and never was the underlying data in the Greentree database ever in question; only the way it was being presented on screen and on some reports,” Joe says.

Coming from CBA, the level of training required was minimal for the 20 Greentree users. Joe explains, “Because Greentree has a lot of similarities to CBA, which the users were used to, the level of training required was significantly lowered. In the early stages we had no resistance to the change; only after the first month when we started having some problems did we encounter resistance. Looking back now, our team is quite clear that their preference is Greentree over CBA; they really like the product. It is much easier for them to find information; the ‘drill-down’ is a great feature. Being able to cut and paste data from clever tables to Excel, and also the removal of the rollover routines, are important to us.”

Very, very, accessible!

Their aim of having a system that provided ease of reporting and the ability to import data easily has been achieved. Joe says, “We now have more flexible reporting and a product that is closer to the start of its development cycle, rather than the end as CBA was.” The simplicity of extracting live data from Greentree for reporting purposes is cited as a key benefit. “It’s very simple, especially as we are able to use third-party reporting tools such as Excel, Access or Crystal Reports. All transactional data is able to be reported on and is not cleared out on rollover,” says Joe.

Prepared for the future!

Taking stock of what they are able to do more effectively in Greentree, Joe describes, “As our businesses mature, we are automating more of the administration processes required to run them. Greentree is giving us a new-generation product that we are developing to allow this to happen easily, compared to CBA.” Joe continues, “It’s hard to say that we have made any direct cost savings, as software products are expected to do more for you, but they also increase the complexity. If we hadn’t made the change to Greentree when we did, then we would have struggled to keep ahead of the growth of the business.”

Asked whether Greentree allows the management team to get a better picture of how the business is performing. Joe comments, “Yes, we are light years ahead of where we were pre-Greentree. We like the product; we are really pleased with its stability, and are excited about the functionality it will provide us as it gets further developed in the future.” Looking to the future Joe says, “At the moment our Petroleum companies and a number of our smaller operations are using Greentree. We envisage that as business requirements change, all our companies will use Greentree.”