Federated Farmers provides a range of services, and a powerful lobbying voice, for 18,000 member farmers and rural families throughout New Zealand. A network of 75 employees and hundreds of volunteer staff, grouped into 24 provinces, are supported by the Wellington-based head office and the main administration centre in Hamilton.
In addition, seven industry groups focus on specific sectors such as dairy, meat and fibre, grain and bees. 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 a new pro forma billing model through its Sage Accpac ERP accounting system. “Endeavour upgraded our ERP and Sage CRM systems so our billing process could be re-engineered,” explains Candyce Christensen, the organisation’s general manager of corporate services.
“We send out about 14,000 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 to tidy up our balance sheet. After upgrading our ERP and CRM, Endeavour implemented a new module in the ERP that raises a pro forma invoice.”
“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 CRM to update it. The process automatically runs processes that update CRM at the same time the data’s entered into ERP, and vice versa.”
On top of the in efficiency gains, with the newly revamped and integrated system, Federated Farmers now have much richer insight into their finances at any point in time.
Future Plans
As well as offering ongoing day-to-day support for Federated Farmers’ ERP and CRM 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 Sage CRM 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. Endeavour Solutions is one of the largest resellers of the well established Greentree accounting and business software in New Zealand, the only reseller of Sage Pro ERP in New Zealand and a leading reseller of Sage CRM and Sage Accpac ERP. The Endeavour team has been providing support, implementation, development and advisory services since 1986.
FOR MORE INFORMATION Endeavour Solutions http://www.endeavour.co.nz or Ph 0800 422 2722