This large, fast, record-holding catamaran builder delivers its public and military passengers to their destinations in the comfort and warmth of their sleek, modern vessels every trip without fuss or incident. The same could not be said about the multiple disparate systems which were struggling to support the business in near ‘perfect storm’ conditions.

Incat Australia have successfully built some of the largest, fastest and most innovatively designed multi-hulled vessels in the world for public and military use in several countries. Mike Cotton, Incat IT Manager, says that basically, “our tired 16 year old dos-based system was prone to human error because some processes were manually carried out and it wasn’t able to provide the flexible reporting we needed.” There was also a lot of duplicated data since the same data needed to be re-keyed into other systems so needless to say Mike wanted “a single, simple integrated system that enabled more flexible reporting and streamlining of business processes.”

A Greentree module for every conceivable job now and into the future

After evaluating and short-listing offerings from three main vendors including SAP Business One, Greentree was chosen since, as far as Mike could see, “there seemed to be a Greentree module that would handle pretty much anything we could throw at it.” He says that all the usual suspects were used as evaluation criteria i.e. features, functionality and cost and Greentree simply came up best overall. Another key driver in the decision to go with Greentree was Mike’s desire to future-proof the company and, based on a very aggressive development path, he’s confident that Greentree will scale progressively as Incat continue to grow and their business needs change, for 10 – 15 years or more.

Sophisticated Payroll with heaps of flexibility

Mike says Incat’s HR staff are extremely happy with and surprised by the sophistication and flexibility found in Greentree’s Payroll module. With a staff of over 700 covered by multiple pay and award agreements across multiple work sites he says payroll is complex but Greentree “handles all the calculations of pay agreements easily.” This alone saves heaps of time and even more time will be saved when the new mobile timesheets are fully developed.

Mobile timesheets will cut administration time by 95%

Mike is enthusiastic about the current development of mobile timesheets that will enable supervisors to use hand-held devices to key in timesheet data. In fact, Mike estimates that this will cut time from an hour each day to about 5 – 10 minutes which is outstanding news for Incat’s supervisors who are also senior trades people as they will now be able to get on with more progressive tasks like providing help and support to team members.

“We couldn’t get an accurate picture of where the business was heading but Greentree integrates all our systems into one and now we have everything we need to run every aspect of the business from the back-office to people working out in the field – we can now see exactly where we’re going”

Qlikview and Greentree combine to produce super-fast deep reporting

A valuable addition for Incat has been Qlikview which has enabled much greater business intelligence to be garnered from deeper data analysis. Mike says he was using Crystal Reports which was good but Qlikview and Greentree combine to enable broader variations of data analysis using models you can design yourself. Having the scope to experiment with the data makes the possibilities endless.

Approvals and Alerts improves workflows and saves dollars

Incat purchases a lot of products which go into building their enormous multi-hulled vessels and this is why they employ three purchasing officers. Greentree’s Approvals and Alerts module has been immensely helpful in speeding-up the chain of requisitions and approvals which notify the appropriate person located in any one of four different buildings. Improving workflow processes was a key priority Mike says since trying to track down people across thousands of square metres of shop floor was a nightmare, not to mention the time wasted and disruption to the progress of jobs. Hold-up’s can result in hours of down-time which costs the company hundreds if not thousands of lost dollars.

Job Cost and Inventory – well developed

Incat’s massive building operation means it inherently has sophisticated job costing and inventory requirements and Mike reckons these are pretty well developed in Greentree. The integration of these two modules alone has improved workflow processes immensely.

Aggressive development path future-proofs the future

In fact, Mike cites Greentree’s very aggressive development path as a stand-out value of having it running the business. He says, “Greentree’s regular upgrades and easy maintenance of a straightforward infrastructure makes me feel very confident about the future.”

Mike sees Greentree as a progressive company and the support he’s had from the local Greentree business partner has been excellent. As far as he’s concerned Incat management now have a clear and present view of business and processes as a direct result of having one integrated system in which information automatically updates all the appropriate modules in real time without the need for human intervention.

About Incat Tasmania

Incat Tasmania has been successfully involved in the ferry and tour boat industry for nearly fifty years and is responsible for the innovative design and building of the record holding Wave Piercing and K-Class catamarans. They’re also responsible for building around 40% of the world’s high speed passenger ferries over 70 metres long. Interest from the US naval forces has resulted in a strategic alliance with Bollinger/Incat USA to build vessels for the US armed forces.

For more information visit: www.incat.com.au