Auckland software branches out

By ADAM GIFFORD

Auckland software house Greentree has won a deal with Australian food service distribution co-operative Nafda which could bring in up to $2 million in licence revenue over the next three years.

Nafda financial controller Bob van Es said the system, including financial management, distribution, workflow and customer management modules, took a month to install at the co-operative's head office in Parramatta at a cost of under $100,000.

It went live in January and has already resulted in a 15 per cent increase in transaction volumes.

Van Es said one of Nafda's 54 distributors had gone live with the software, and 10 more were assessing it.

"We can see operational cost benefits in having common software. At the moment we have to interface with 20 different software packages," van Es said.

"We needed something which did the job but was affordable.

"Our members range from businesses with turnover from $5 million to $50 million, but most are $10 to $20 million.

"Those businesses can't afford to drop a lot of money into software. Many don't even have an IT department, so they want something they can use out of the box."

Van Es said Nafda looked at more than 15 systems before it came across Greentree late in the exercise.

Some co-operative members use CBA, Greentree's earlier DOS-based accounting product.

Greentree is built in Jade, so it has its own database or can integrate with any standard database, and it runs on Microsoft Windows with full integration to Office.

He said each distributor had up to 7000 product lines and 3000 customers, so the system needed to carry the complete stock holdings, handle customer inquiries and make sure the goods were delivered to the right place.

"The key factor in our choice was the Greentree distribution system, which was built into the product," van Es said.

"We can shorten order entry time, we can put up new products and customers on the fly. We are putting in Greentree Webstore so our guys can do online ordering."

He said many of the packages considered still used batch processing, but with Greentree live data was always available.

Greentree director Peter Dickinson said winning such a potentially large deal against global vendors was a welcome endorsement for the software.

He said Greentree had built up a network of 80 resellers around the world.

An MIS 2003 market census found Greentree the largest single provider of accounting software to the New Zealand market.