Endeavour the difference for Federated Farmers
When the well-known organisation needed to overhaul its billing systems, it made sense to partner with Endeavour, experts in both accounting and IT solutions…
“Peter has got a really good understanding of the accounting cycle and processes that have to take place, and that was a really big help to implementing the new system and re-designing it to make sure things just ran a whole lot smoother. It made our billing process a whole lot easier .” |
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At a Glance
Business Objective >
Better integration of Sage Accpac ERP and SageCRM solutions to improve financial and billing processes, and overall organisational efficiencies.
Solution >
A system upgrade and billing process reengineering by business software specialists Endeavour Solutions.
Business Benefits >
Improved accounting processes and visibility. Improved business insights and enhanced productivity
Federated Farmers provides a wide range of services, and a powerful lobbying voice, for 18,000 member farmers and rural families throughout New Zealand. In addition, seven industry groups focus on specific sector issues such as dairy, meat and fibre, grain, bees and high country. A network of 57 employees and 24 provincial executives, are supported by the eleven offices scattered around the country, with head office in Wellington and the main administration centre in Hamilton.
When Federated Farmers first partnered with business software specialist Endeavour Solutions last year, one of the main projects the organisation needed to progress was a major re-engineering of its billing processes to introduce pro forma invoicing through Sage Accpac ERP. “Endeavour upgraded our Sage Accpac ERP and SageCRM systems so our billing process could be re-engineered,” explains Candyce Christensen, the organisation’s General Manager of Corporate Services.
“We send out about 14,500 invoices in January and one of the reasons we had to upgrade and go through the re-engineering process was so we could change to a system of pro forma invoicing. After upgrading our Sage Accpac ERP and SageCRM to the latest version, Endeavour implemented order entry and inventory modules in the Sage Accpac ERP that enabled us to raise pro forma invoices for our subscriptions.”
Understanding was key
Christensen says the organisation chose to partner with Endeavour after an impressive presentation from consulting director Peter Hooker, who is a qualified accountant.
“The integration of our systems has been fundamental because there used to be a whole lot of manual data entry and now the process has been automated so there’s no room for data entry error, or forgetting to go into SageCRM to update it. The system automatically runs processes that update SageCRM at the same time the data’s entered into Sage Accpac ERP, and vice versa.”
On top of the efficiency gains, with the newly revamped and integrated system, Federated Farmers now have much richer insight into their finances at any point in time.
Non-financial staff benefit
Another significant business enhancement project undertaken by Endeavour for Federated Farmers has been the deployment of QlikView, a business intelligence tool.
QlikView sits across the organisation’s Sage Accpac ERP and SageCRM packages to give Federated Farmers staff members a previously unavailable graphical insight into its membership base.
“We have improved our financial reporting processes by introducing QlikView,” says Christensen. She says the tool has improved the data the organisation can extract from its SageCRM regarding membership statistics.
“QlikView draws info from both Sage Accpac ERP and SageCRM and puts it into a user-friendly or higherlevel reporting format so non-financial people can get useful information from the system,” she says. “It means managers can generate graphs and charts through QlikView without having to come to us and ask us to drill information out of the Sage Accpac ERP system.”
Future plans
As well as offering ongoing day-to-day support for Federated Farmers’ Sage Accpac ERP and SageCRM solutions, going forward, Endeavour will continue to play a strategic role helping the organisation make the most of those systems, Christensen says.
Federated Farmers is currently not taking full advantage of the leads database within its SageCRM solution, which has the capacity to generate marketing leads lists and marketing plans.
“We’re not using that to its full capacity. One of Endeavour’s roles will be to give us training on how best to do that,” she says.
