SAP evolves to meet growing developments at Property Ventures
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
With rising petrol costs and increasing suburb to city traffic jams, the old close knit communities where work and essential services are within walking or cycling distance are making a comeback.
In the 1950’s New Zealanders started to leave the older inner city suburbs for sprawling residential and commercial estates. Boom economies, cheap petrol and two-car families had brought about suburbia heaven - and it didn’t matter that work, shopping and schools were only accessible by car or public transport.
Five decades on with petrol prices driving up the cost of living, people are starting to downsize and together they are forming urban communities that are breathing life back into the inner cities.
To manage this population influx old rundown and abandoned inner city properties are being redeveloped by astute developers into attractive apartments, hotels, restaurants, nightlife and offices.
New towns are also being created to meet the housing needs of a growing population looking for work life balance with less time in traffic and more time enjoying the community.
In 1997 Property Ventures Ltd., founded by Dolf de Roos and managed by Dave Henderson, began to bridge the gap in the property market by revitalising inner city precincts and creating new urban communities.
Following the principals of traditional neighbourhood development, which promotes people-focused communities, the company started building lively new communities for residents and workers alike by combining exceptional urban design with high quality construction.
Some of their most prominent projects include the Five Mile town development in Queenstown, the SOL entertainment and retail precinct in the heart of Christchurch City, and the planned Beechnest Development at the Nelson Lakes.
Today the company has 20 subsidiaries managing $263m (March 07) in assets, and over 140 staff based in Dunedin, Invercargill, Queenstown, Auckland, and its head office in Christchurch.
Each of the subsidiaries was formed to manage a development project, and as the business grew the task of consolidating all their financial data into one report was proving increasingly difficult, time consuming and frustrating - often resulting in data that was unreliable, hard to analyse and lacked integrity.
Catherine Booth, Group Accountant at Property Ventures says, “We were previously using QuickBooks, but as the business expanded with more and more subsidiaries the software couldn’t provide the data we wanted. We needed a more robust system that could manage and consolidate our increasing number of databases into one, provide high data integrity, and allow multiple user access.”
The new system had to provide cross-company reporting, automated business administration, and controls that would assure processes were adhered to. It also needed to be user-friendly with easy and immediate access to relevant and timely management information, and the capacity for project business growth.
Group Financial Controller, Colin Cadigan, started looking for a solution in 2005 and he was immediately impressed when he came across SAP Business One.
He says, “What we wanted was integrity of data and cross-company reporting that was easy to use and SAP came up trumps at a price we could afford. SAP not only gives us a common system for all our subsidiaries, it is also scalable with many features and industry solutions that can be integrated and tailored as the business grows.”
“We have a close relationship with Business Evolution Group strongly built on capability and trust. They’re a great team to work with and being Christchurch based is very convenient for us. We have an on-going relationship as there are many projects we’re still working on such as implementing a fixed assets
register.”
"SAP Business One is an ideal solution for small and mid-sized organisations trying to gain a comprehensive view of their operations. It has been rewarding to see Property Ventures join our extensive community of customers whose business success is supported and enabled by an SAP solution. The combination of a functional cost-effective application platform which supports easy customisation delivers just the right solution." says Ian Black, Managing Director SAP New Zealand.
Since SAP went live in October 2006 the company has enjoyed the ability to shape the application to further meet their requirements. As the business has grown, SAP’s flexibility and featured industry solutions has provided a tailored accounting system that has evolved with Property Ventures to provide full reliability and data integrity.
“Previously we had to cross reference 15 or so subsidiary spreadsheets to be able to provide a creditors list across all companies. Now with SAP Business One, we can see the creditors all in one place. We can also sort them by company name or date and have a total across all companies at any given time,” says Catherine.
“SAP also provides us an audit trail, which helps us to unravel the data changes made by another user. What we like best are the many features and the flexibility that SAP offers - the more we tailor it to meet our needs the better it gets.”
Brodie Archer of Business Evolution Group who managed the SAP implementation says, “One of the key tasks for our team, which was completed successfully, was to extract, convert and validate their data from QuickBooks into SAP quickly and with complete accuracy, and also set the system up so they could add new subsidiaries easily from day one.”
“The installation went smoothly, as we worked closely with the team at Property Ventures who have a good understanding of business processes and the functionality required to meet their needs. Also, as their hardware is HP, being an HP partner was to our advantage throughout the project.”
“Going forward there are multiple integration projects planned to further integrate their specialist systems in to SAP. We have an open and honest working relationship with Property Ventures and we see this as key to building trust with all our customers,” she says.
|
|