Merging of retail & wholesale works best for Motorcorp

Motorcorp is an importer and distributor of luxury cars, and currently manages the Jaguar, Renault, Volvo and the recently acquired Land Rover franchises. Usually, these would be separately managed and located vehicle distributor and retail dealerships, but at Motorcorp the distribution and retail dealerships co-exist at the same location, which is unusual. As Andrew Butchart, Motorcorp Financial Controller explains, customers wanting to buy parts would come to the counter, where the retail sales person would raise a purchase order and go next door to the wholesale (distribution) counter, where the parts person would re-key all the information to show the sale of the part to retail. Obviously, there was lots of duplication of effort going on, not to mention the time involved, and from where the customer was standing this probably didn’t look particularly efficient. This situation became the key driver in the decision to rationalise the wholesale and retail operations for all the franchises into a single retail and distribution system later known as Parts Direct.

Several systems were evaluated, but Greentree was chosen because of its flexibility for customisation and the JADE environment enabled Rapid Application Development (RA D). Greentree is also web enabled and e-commerce compatible.

Job Cost module easily customised to create JADE Motor Vehicles (JMV)

Motorcorp purchased Greentree Financials (General Ledger, Receivables, Payables, and Cash Management and Allocations), Distribution (Inventory Management, Sales Orders & Purchase Orders) and Job Costing modules. The Greentree Distribution suite manages the parts side of the business, while Greentree Job Costing was customised to create a system named JADE Motor Vehicles (JMV) to incorporate vehicle tracking, warranty management, service workshop management, quoting, and a marketing database.

The JMV system is networked throughout the two Auckland sites, and allows extra management of vehicle sales and servicing of the wholesale and retail functions.

Webstore enables “unique” customisation

The Parts Direct System provides 20 dealers with online access to parts ordering and availability inquiries via the Greentree Webstore & Distribution modules, which were customised to Motorcorp’s specific requirements. Collectively, Parts Direct handles 70,000 inventory lines.

Butchart believes the flexibility for customisation was a crucial factor for choosing Greentree. He elaborates, “Our business model is quite unique and no other system could handle this set-up quite like Greentree. Being flexible and customisable, Greentree gave us the ability to process sales of parts and vehicles direct from wholesale to the retail customer, avoiding any doubling-up of processes.” The efficiency gains of this process are reflected in Motorcorp’s pricing strategies and have enabled them to be more price-competitive – customers reap the benefits of a single smarter slicker retail and distribution system.

Having recently acquired the Land Rover franchise, Greentree’s Partnering Services helped with the transition of stock into Greentree.

Leveraging Greentree Partnering Services for help with Access manipulation & reporting

Butchart explains, “We’re car dealers, not data analysts, so the help Greentree’s Partnering Services have provided in terms of manipulating new pricing strategies, writing specifications, transitioning Land Rover stock into Greentree and producing reports for us using Access has been a huge help.” Greentree’s Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) has enabled very easy connectivity, extraction and manipulation of Access data and “we get reports back that we can understand”, says Butchart.

Supercessions - a “couldn’t do without” enhancement

Another really useful Inventory-related module for Motorcorp has been the Greentree Supercession module. Somehow, every change car manufacturers make to their parts inventory must be tracked, traced and recorded, and Butchart says “this has been a significant enhancement for us and Greentree handles it very well”. Sales are not lost because no one was aware a superseded part was available.

Driving forward

The Motorcorp Group has grown its user licences from 30 to 70 in a few short years, and this will continue to grow as they continue to tap into Greentree’s potential. Motorcorp has achieved a higher level of service to its customers and dealer network, and “the positive support from Greentree will continue to take us forward”.