Motor importer gets rolling with Greentree

By ADAM GIFFORD

Greentree International has sold its new Jade-based Greentree financial management system to Motorcorp Holdings, importer of Jaguar, Renault, Citroen and Volvo cars.

Greentree director Vlad Kozak said it was the first time the software had been used in a distribution business, and it required extensive customisation to meet Motorcorp's needs.

"That allowed us to put to the test Jade's promises about objectoriented programming allowing rapid application development and customisation."

The four Motorcorp franchises previously ran separate systems for each dealer or distributor.

Greentree International, formerly Focus Software, developed the Greentree suite of applications as a Windows-based, web-enabled replacement for its popular DOS-based CBA midrange accounting system.

It is one of the first broad market applications written in the Jade environment developed by Sir Gil Simpson's Cardinal Group.

Jade Partners, Cardinal Transportation Solutions and Greentree have made the work done for Motorcorp the basis for the Jade Motor Vehicle (JMV) system, which will be marketed as a complete e-commerce package for the industry.

Mr Kozak said Motorcorp bought Greentree Financials, which includes general ledger, receivables, payables, cash management and allocations modules, and Distribution, which includes inventory management, sales order and purchase orders.

But the core of the business required a job-costing module, something Greentree did not have on the shelf.

The company turned to Nigel Whiteman of Task Management, one of the biggest CBA dealers, who five years ago re-engineered CBA cost management. The resulting product, Workbench, was redeveloped in Jade to become Greentree job costing.

Mr Whiteman said Workbench had 30 customers here and in Australia, including one 1500-user site.

"It's very strong in all aspects of time management, so it has found a niche in the professional services and contracting areas."

Mr Kozak said that in the Motorcorp system, each vehicle had a unique stock code, allowing it to be tracked through its life, from wholesale to retail and on through its service history.

The 23,000 stock parts carried by Motorcorp have been loaded into the database, and 100,000 further stock items which can be ordered in are being added.

The system runs on IBM Netfinity servers and has 30 concurrent users in Motorcorp's four main Auckland sites.

The next stage will involve giving dealers web access to the system, so they can place orders and check the availability of parts.

Mr Kozak said the project had allowed Greentree to get well down the track of creating a prototype web store which could be used by all Greentree customers.

"We've looked at the FastNet source code and put that in the base schema, so the system can create web pages with Greentree tags in the software, so when the page is rendered it grabs data from the database such as stock codes, price and availability."

He said Jade's object-orientation meant any customisation was done by adding a sub schema, which did not affect the rest of the programming and avoided "version lock," where users cannot upgrade to new versions without completely rewriting or abandoning the modifications.

"There are 1000 CBA sites with customisation done by us. Now we only need to store the modifications - that is a major selling point."

Because Greentree has all CBA's existing functionality and can be made to look and feel like CBA, or take on a Windows look and feel, little training is needed at sites migrating over.

"The general reaction from CBA users when they see Greentree is: 'When do we upgrade?' because of the ease of transition," Mr Whiteman said.

That is good news for Greentree, which aims to have 350 sites live by March 2001, the end of the next financial year. It has so far made 40 sales of the new system.