Greentree helps to ace the competition

CHALLENGE:
William Loud was plagued by slow financial reporting and data entry, and frustrated with having to do job costing manually.

SOLUTION:
Greentree’s integration means single-point data entry, while Financial Management and Job Cost Management provide crucial real-time information.

RESULTS:
Engineers and project managers are right on top of their work, no more month-end shutdowns for financial processing, data entry hassles are gone, and all staff can use the system to get what they need.

The 2012 Australian Open Men’s Final was the longest final in tennis history. Novak Djokovic successfully defended his title, defeating Rafael Nadal in a match lasting five hours and 53 minutes.

That match was played on a surface called Plexicushion, laid by Victoria-based company William Loud (Aust) Pty Ltd. The stress that a Grand Slam tennis tournament generates on a playing surface means the surface has to be re-laid prior to each tournament. There’s no room for error.

“The Australian Open people tell us what speed they want the courts to be, and we have to provide them with an end product that meets that requirement,” explains Rob Keogh, William Loud’s chief financial officer. “They test each court and if we’re outside their parameters, we’ve got to basically re-do it, so control of the whole process is critical.”

Laying a new surface takes about three months, and William Loud’s engineers use Greentree to monitor their projects, ensuring they’re running to schedule, and that the costs are under control.

“The building industry is highly competitive,” Rob says, “so you have to be able to monitor exactly where you’re at.”

“Horrible” old system

Tennis courts are just one aspect of William Loud’s work. While they specialise in sports surfaces of all kinds – from netball courts to athletics tracks – they also build roadways and car parks. They started as a contracting business in the late 19th century, laid asphalt tennis courts and school playgrounds, then got into artificial surfaces when they laid the warm-up track for the 1956 Melbourne Olympics.

Their journey to Greentree began with a search for a new accounting system that would deliver live information, with integrated functionality to speed up data entry. They also wanted a system that could expand to fill other needs, once the financial side had been sorted out.

“Prior to Greentree we were using Sage Solution 6,” Rob recalls. “It was a bit of a mish-mash, with too many independent modules. The reporting was also very poor, and our inability to pull out historic reports while continuing data entry was absolutely killing us. For example, with debtors or creditors we’d have to stop processing for the month until we’d processed all of the previous month – it was just a horrible, horrible system. In addition we had to do our own job costing manually; it didn’t handle that in any way.”

Simple and logical

Greentree was one of three software providers on William Loud’s shortlist, and got the nod for the strength of its financial reporting, particularly Job Costing, its CRM capabilities, and its user-friendliness.

William Loud’s accounting staff were the first users of Greentree, but it’s since become an invaluable tool for engineers and project managers, who appreciate its ability to deliver live information about their jobs.

“It’s a very logical system,” Rob says. “Our estimators and management meet once a week to review jobs that are in progress or finished, so the real-time information is key. Also, they don’t ask me how to do things; the system is simple enough that non-financial people can get in there, find the basic information they want, and understand what that information means.”

No more month-end logjams

Greentree’s total integration has also proved its worth emphatically.

“That’s probably the most important part of it, in that we’re not trying to gather data from different sources; we’ve got it all there,” Rob says. “Once you’ve put your data in, it can be used in a multitude of areas. It can just be re-interpreted, whereas with the old system you had to do that by hand, so to speak. Greentree has reduced our end-of-year and end-of-month work enormously.”

The Greentree Partner made the implementation easy.

“It was a very simple and stress-free process,” says Rob. “I believe it was up and running in a matter of days.”

Outstanding returns

At the time it was implemented, William Loud considered Greentree a big investment, but Rob says the returns are apparent to everyone in the company.

“We’ve just got better information and better work flow, and that leads to better performance out on the work site because we know exactly what is going on in real-time rather than in historical terms.

“In the building industry you are tendering against competitors every single day. It’s price-driven, but we can be more adaptive to needs in terms of cost adjustments. Greentree allows us to be as competitive as we can be, and it’s given us the ability to expand our thinking as to what we can do.

“Greentree enables us to increasingly improve our efficiency, and that’s what we’ve got to do in the modern world.”

ABOUT WILLIAM LOUD (AUST) PTY LTD

William Loud (Aust) Pty Ltd are specialists in the Plexipave/Plexicushion synthetic surfacing system, which has become the most popular acrylic hardcourt system in Australia. They also offer artificial surfaces for a variety of other sports, and are continually evaluating new products to test their suitability for Australian climatic conditions. Advice and assistance in the construction of sporting facilities, general civil construction projects and asphalting are also provided.
www.wmloud.com.au