In businesses all over the world, computers capture every detail about millions of customer transactions every second of every day. Greentree's modular approach to the integration of systems ensures that every transaction is recorded only once and can be accessed, shared, analysed, reported and viewed by authorised users anywhere at any time.

But when multiple disparate systems cant talk to each other and youre relying on mere mortals to recall the details about some transactions then chances are charges will get forgotten.

This was exactly the situation at Colbeck and Gunton (C & G) a Marine and Industrial Insulation company, who were struggling with a disconnected system which relied a lot upon super-human memory to recall all the costs associated with any given customer transaction. As Alexis Heffernan, Administration Manager at C & G explained, "we didnt really know if we were recovering all the costs associated with a customers job so we werent entirely happy about the accuracy of our job costing process."

Alexis says the key priorities for a new system were improving the accuracy and integrity of job costing by factoring out reliance on selective human memory when it came to recalling all the costs associated with jobs.

Super-integration = the luxury of knowing every cost is accounted for

Alexis says there were no linkages in the old system which meant the business was relying heavily on linking Excel spreadsheets to perform a number of key business activities such as job costing, inventory and purchasing which were all manual processes.

Manual processes inherently require human intervention to complete tasks and this is where Greentrees integration has made a huge difference for C & G according to Alexis. "The simplicity of being able to call all costs into a job or report is outstanding and we no longer rely on someones memory – nothing gets missed."

Greentree's open data formats make company restructure "pretty easy"

To make life even more interesting Alexis says they recently went through a company re-structure and this really tested the flexibility and adaptability of Greentree. She says "Greentree handled the transition of data from the old to the new structure surprisingly well – it was pretty easy and went without too much fuss."

Confidence in the integrity of the decision making process

Quotes are based on the recorded historical actual costs from previously completed jobs, so when costs are forgotten or hidden management can only work with what they have, which may not be the full picture. Given that job costing is a key business activity at C & G it has a direct impact on competitiveness and profitability and this is another area in which Greentree has made a real difference.

Management and staff responsible for costing jobs are now confident that the decisions theyre making are based upon a complete set of information about previously completed jobs. The integrity of the job cost process has greatly improved.

The local Greentree partner worked closely with Colbeck and Gunton to implement Greentree and Alexis says they continue to provide very good ongoing support which is often hard to come by these days. The next phase will be to get Greentree Quoting up and running and Alexis is looking forward to demonstrating to management more of Greentrees broad and deep business advantage.