COMPANY
Auckland Rugby Union
INDUSTRY
Sports
BUSINESS SIZE
Medium

Rugby leader advances power and efficiency of information systems

When the Auckland Rugby Union were looking for an MYOB Advanced support partner, Endeavour’s personalities, reputation and references won out.

Finding a system suited to the modern game

In the 1990s the Auckland Rugby Union (ARU) won five national provincial championships, and also implemented a financial system they continued to use for the next 20 years. It wasn’t cloud-based, and was showing its age in terms of running reports, and accessing and inputting data. It was also time-consuming and laborious for the ARU team.

“Our accounts-payable process was not where we wanted it to be in terms of accountability and authorisation signing off,” recalls Warrick Nansett, Head of Business Support & Planning. “It was definitely time for an upgrade. We needed to move with the times, and start looking into the modern technology we could harness.”

When the ARU first began to explore their options, they considered simply updating their existing system. However, the ARU’s “brother” organisation, The Blues (the local Super Rugby franchise) had gone through a similar process two years earlier, and with a similar business model to the ARU, Warrick asked if they would share their research with him. “They let me look at all their research and information,” he says. “They had gone with MYOB Advanced, and they had done all the legwork that backed up their decision.”

MYOB Advanced – a clear choice

MYOB Advanced met all the criteria the ARU had identified. That included being able to scan accounts-payable invoices, and having an automated accounts-payable authorisation process, with delegated authority limits in place. “We were looking for something that was pretty much all online, and with the potential to over time go paperless,” Warrick says. “We also really liked the reporting structure, and the way we could set the general ledger up. It's really flexible, and that means you can pull more powerful reports.”

The simplicity of MYOB Advanced was also a selling point, he says. “With some of the other options, you had to buy a number of 'bolt-on' extras to get it to where you needed it to be. That wasn't the case with Advanced. It's all self-contained.”

Finding the right team-mates

What was unusual about this project was that the customer – the ARU – had already made a decision around the product they would move to. The next step was to identify a support partner, and the ARU had three potential candidates lined up.

“For the ARU, the RFP was more about finding the right support partner to work with,” says Maria Mullane, Endeavour’s Business Development Manager. “It’s not often we are up against two other MYOB Partner competitors all pitching for the same product. It was our personalities, reputation and references that won us the relationship.”

Warrick agrees, and goes on to say that Endeavour just made a better impression. “Endeavour really stood out from the other two,” he says. “Their presentation was really thorough, and the support team that sat behind the product, that would do the implementation, instilled us with confidence. They outlined a detailed implementation timetable, and they identified all the potential risks, and then helped us work out how to manage and mitigate those risks.”

For both parties, the implementation was both challenging and interesting. “We did some really impressive work re-designing their general ledgers and building custom reports in order to deliver far more granular visibility of the business operations,” Maria recalls. “And we did it while also enabling ease of consolidation at a company or divisional level.”

Kicking goals in the future

Go live was 1 November 2018, so for the ARU it’s still very new. The previous system had only 3 people using it, and that’s still the case for the moment. However, this is due to Endeavour and ARU’s determination that Advanced is fully implemented and tested before bringing the budget managers on board.

The potential inherent in MYOB Advanced is exciting. “There are a lot more efficiencies around data input, uploading invoices, copying and pasting, uploading journals, etc.,” Warrick says. “We can tell already that a lot of the time we'd previously spent manually doing tasks like that is going to be significantly reduced.”

Budget managers will be able to run their own analysis reports, and their own sub-accounts within their cost centers. They’ll also be able to get real-time information, which will be a major advantage.

“The power of MYOB Advanced's general ledger system is essential,” Warrick explains. “Because it dictates how much you can pull back out of the system from a report writing perspective. The system enables you to have any combination of general ledger accounts and sub-accounts, made up of as many segments as you need.”

Warrick goes on to explain how the accounts-payable system will benefit the ARU in terms of automating authorisations and managing spend to budget, down to an event level, and having the ability to delegate authority within those authorisation procedures. “It's going to really help us tighten things up with our accounts-payable procedures,” he says.

Looking ahead, the ARU can also see Advanced will be a lot more powerful in terms of extracting data, meaning they can analyse that data more efficiently. “For example, we'll be able to see how much we spend on certain types of costs irrespective of which part of the business they relate to, which is something we couldn't do with the old system,” Warrick says. “We'll be able to run reports across the business. It's going to be really helpful in terms of gaining insights into our expenditure.”

About Endeavour

Endeavour is a supplier of enterprise software to a multitude of industries, specialising in the manufacturing and wholesale distribution sectors, as well as Not For Profits. Our offering includes ERP, business planning and business intelligence solutions. These solutions enable our clients to ‘join the dots’ in their businesses – enabling controls at all levels and helping them grow by empowering them with quality, real-time information.

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