I really enjoyed the Australian National iPOS User Day last year. Although we have run an iPOS User Day in the UK for six years, this was the first time we had held one in Australia. It was great to meet so many of our Australian iPOS for SunSystems clients and to be part of such a vibrant and engaged group. It was gratifying to see clients travel from all parts to attend the day. During the event we were honoured to have a couple of stand-up customer stories: Phil from Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCC) in the morning and Geoff from BoysTown in the afternoon. These are two very different types of organisations: the tenth largest sporting stadium in the world and a community provider delivering quality-of-life programs for marginalised and disadvantaged youth. Each of them had a riveting story to tell about their iPOS eProcument implementation.
MCC was a story of efficiency and integration. Eliminating the vagaries of a manual purchasing practice followed closely by an integration between iPOS and the ground maintenance works order system to ensure approvals, accruals, goods received and final invoice values were processed in the SunSystems ledgers and seamlessly passed back to the works orders. Such robust levels of integration gave management confidence in their financial and commitment reporting. Phil’s experience with iPOS XML was that it’s easy, quick and completely reliable to date and in his own words “something we couldn’t even have dreamed of before iPOS”.
BoysTown was a story about a company in the throes of cultural change. Again removing the manual PO system and working through the phased rollout of automation across 14 locations and all the challenges that entails. Although there had been no intention to reduce the accounts payable (AP), team it had dropped by one through attrition without any performance problems. With key metrics like percentage of invoices with a PO reference steadily increasing and the average time to invoice payment reduced by 20+% they are well on the way to success.
The overwhelming feedback from attendees on the day was “we love customer stories” and I look forward to recruiting another couple of clients to tell their stories next time.
You can read more about Professional Advantage and iPOS here.
