Opteon Pty Ltd- licensed valuers and property consultants, Australia
Opteon implements Enterprise by HansaWorld to manage financials, resources, projects and timesheets with built-in Wide Area Networking for mobile staff.
Company Profile
Opteon Pty Ltd provides valuations and consultancy in relation to properties in the commercial, industrial, office, retail, licensed, sub-division, rural and residential sectors. The organisation carries out in excess of 3000 residential property valuations and more than 70 large commercial valuations each month.
www.opteonproperty.com.au
Before HansaWorld
According to General Manager Patrick Verryn, Opteon had outgrown the functionality of MYOB. "It was becoming too limited for our business. We had a five concurrent user licence and needed a system that was more robust with greater functionality. We had issues with departmental cost centre accounting and due to the limited licences had to wait for others to log out and reboot the server on a weekly basis to clear out all logins," he says.
Choosing Hansaworld
Opteon Pty Ltd analysed many options on the market before choosing HansaWorld. "We looked at a product called ABM in great detail and a number of mid-range packages such as Accpac and Great Plains, but we needed something more modern and suitable for our budget," explains Verryn. "With our offices being based in Perth, it was also very important that the provider could guarantee instant access to good support."
Verryn was introduced to HansaWorld by an IT professional he had previously dealt with. "I had heard of HansaWorld through an existing user and he was raving about the solution. He said that if you could write an application that would do everything you want it would take many years and you still wouldn't get what HansaWorld is offering in a single integrated solution. The added benefit of being able to run the system on different platforms with different databases was attractive since we are considering using Linux. HansaWorld's platform independency meant that we have more flexibility in the future which I didn't see in the other products," he concludes.
The Implementation and the Solution
Opteon were looking to implement HansaWorld Enterprise during their quiet period over Christmas and were very positive about HansaWorld's ability to meet the timetable. Verryn explains: "The consultants were very knowledgeable and well prepared with a really good structure to how they work. The introduction of the product was at the right pace for our organisation, and with the help of the consultants we were able to design the workflows to get what we wanted out of the system. The real benefit of running HansaWorld will be that we now have a base and a platform to build on to run our business. We are now able to collect the key information that we previously could not. Using the ERP CRM software functionality we have categorised our customers and now can instantly see the source of our income and where to focus on in the future."
- Opteon are running Enterprise with 20 users on 2 companies with Accounts, Job Costing, Graphical Resource Planner, CRM and Wide Area Networking.
The Benefits
- Better customer analysis due to CRM functions
- Time savings as the system is running in real time
- Mobility for staff who spend a lot of time out of the office
- Improved reporting
- Greater security and audit trails
 |
"A major improvement for us is integrated CRM. We now have a single database of contacts which previously was managed in an Excel spreadsheet. When we started the process we had 300 customers on our system. We now have over 1000 contacts who we are interacting with on a regular basis, Verryn says.
| |
"We now have stronger reporting and the ability to search for information within a report is something I haven't seen in any other system. The Personal Desktop allowing me to drag and drop shortcuts gives me fast and easy access to my daily tasks and reports. We also have better control of accounting with audit trails and no longer have to waste time solving problems caused by altered transactions," he adds.
Future Plans
Opteon Pty Ltd plans to expand the HansaWorld system to track fixed assets using the Fixed Assets module. Field based staff will take advantage of HansaWorld's fully functional mobile clients for Nokia Business Phones, running calendar, timesheets and CRM. According to Verryn: "We plan to use the integrated document management features and in the future we will look into adding more functionality that is important for our business."
