Looking to pursue new market opportunities and enable more meaningful relationships with customers, this 100 year old water systems company turned to Greentree to help reinvent the business through technology and process improvement.

“We needed to define our competitive difference through systems and processes and Greentree is providing this infrastructure; well able to support growth and entry into the Australian market.”

Business reinvention

After 12 months of market research, Greentree was chosen as the system to help transform HJ Cooper into a more competitive, best practice environment. With over 3,000 inventory items plus made-to-stock and made-to-order requirements, the obvious place to start was with an innovative inventory management solution for better management and monitoring.

Rapid deployment

challenges It was envisaged that key Greentree modules could be implemented reasonably quickly and in fact, they were. But as HJ Cooper Financial Controller, Neal Taylor explains, the speed of deployment presented some learning challenges for users who rose to the occasion,

“Our challenge was, and remains, finding our way through the feature-rich goldmine of Greentree functionality. Early on we needed lots of telephone help, now we learn as we go and a phone call is fairly rare. I guess that’s a solid testimony to both the system and our enthusiasm for it.”

HJ Cooper Managing Director, Ivan Ramsey has high expectations of how Greentree will help the business “achieve shorter lead times through better demand planning and inventory management and expedite customer contact – basically, we’re looking to reinvent the business.”

Inventory – the ‘hub’ of the manufacturing business

The business is basically divided into 3 reasonably complex production areas; rain water products, solar heating and hot water cylinders and every product or component must be accounted for differently in terms of inventory. For example, the rainwater production area undertakes mostly one-off jobs so most jobs are made-to-order whereas hot water cylinders are reasonably standard items made-to-stock and with approximately 3,000 items to keep track of, Ivan says he’s expecting Greentree to provide them with a whole new level of flexibility. The integrated flexibility of Greentree should enable H J Cooper to allocate and account for stock more accurately than they ever have before. To beef-up the inventory management function, a specialist inventory manager has been appointed and he will be looking to extract the most value from Greentree’s inventory module as possible.

Qlikview for more insights into customer data

To help garner more intelligent insights into the burgeoning amounts of data the business will generate over the coming months and years, Qlikview for Greentree will be used to analyse customer trends and buying patterns, among other tasks. As data histories build, the business should be well placed to anticipate and identify customer needs which will have implications for most areas of the business but particularly for sales, demand planning, marketing and inventory management.

MRP, Bill of Materials, Job Cost – a disciplined manufacturing environment

Since manufacturing is a core business activity, Ivan says they’re also looking to Greentree to provide a more disciplined structure around the job costing process. This will ensure that HJ Cooper has a clear and accurate view of all job related costs as they happen and again, as data histories build, they will have access to accurate data which has implications for multiple business management purposes.

Increasing levels of reporting accuracy

As the real-time value of Greentree’s integrated modules and single data entry point impacts upon business processes, Ivan and Neal expect that over time, reporting will increasingly become more accurate. Most importantly, managers will be able to customise reports and view data of most relevance to them thus saving valuable time.

The promise of CRM

Staff have undertaken lots of training in anticipation of the implementation of CRM and Ivan says, “once CRM has been implemented it will be a case of working the system harder - it’s all about information.” Pursuing and achieving the best possible customer experience is the ultimate goal and teaming-up with Greentree is a strategic move towards achieving that goal.

“We were looking to pull together disparate processes into a quick and easy system which Greentree is doing for us. We’re also able to better track and respond to customer enquiries, manage warranties and basically, have a more meaningful relationship with our customers.”

“Greentree went live just 6 months ago but already, we’ve moved from virtually no IT infrastructure to being reasonably IT savvy.”

Ivan Ramsey, Managing Director – HJ Cooper

About HJ Cooper

HJ Cooper is New Zealand’s iconic plumbing industry business looking forward to celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2008.

HJ Cooper has a well-earned reputation as a respected manufacturer and supplier of water heating and rainwater products and also supplies an extensive range of gas, electric and solar water heaters and boiling water units.

Based in Avondale, Auckland, the company distributes throughout New Zealand and across the Pacific region.

For more information visit: www.hjcooper.co.nz