Toyota’s regional focus, global ambition

Toyota Technical Center 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 new specialised operation will be a key contributor to the development of innovative vehicle designs for Toyota’s global regional markets, while also involved in fine-tuning models for the particular needs of Asia and Australia.

In order to meet the critical launch date, the management team at Toyota Technical Center required a new business system to ‘go-live’ on 1st January 2005. Temporarily they had 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. “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,” Kim says. “Greentree was found during an open day for business systems. Greentree was a 90% fit for what we wanted to achieve. There was a need for some modification specifically for our processes, which appeared easy to develop.”

Very, very, flexible!

The management at Toyota Technical Center 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,” Kim 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 from the 1st of January 2005, and Payroll for Greentree and Greentree’s full CRM suite implemented in July.

Kim 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. 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 the management to get a better picture of how the business is performing. Kim explains, “We were looking for a strong job costing and project management, also we 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 Toyota to manage the labour 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.”

To meet the anticipated implementation deadline, the Greentree Business Partner worked closely with the team at Toyota Technical to deliver a flexible product and service offering. “It has been really good working with the Greentree team. 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.”