Established in New Zealand in 1994, TPF Restaurants manages the
New Zealand Burger King franchise. It has 65 restaurants in New
Zealand and a growing operation in Australia.
In a food service market that has grown by more than 40% in the
last five years [Euromonitor, May 2004], it is essential that
Burger King's information assets enable it to operate with agility
and strategic confidence.
TPF Restaurants was relying on its five-year-old accounting system
and number-crunching by staff to provide the management information
it needed. The risks of losing position in this fast-paced,
information-reliant market were high.
In 1999, management realised the company had outgrown its
existing accounting system and needed a comprehensive business
solution. The legacy system was unreliable and the integrity of the
inventory data was questionable. This impacted on year-end
reporting and made it difficult to calculate profitability
levels.
The legacy application did not integrate with other systems
easily because it was character based rather than number based, and
complicated and time consuming procedures were required to generate
reports.
The company identified that it needed a system that:
- could provide restaurant managers with quality information
without taking up too much of the accounting staff's time,
- was accurate and flexible with up-to-date reporting and
analysis, and
- had superior functionality and was easy to use.
The provider needed to:
- be financially stable
- have a long-term commitment to New Zealand, and
- be able to support the client and continuously develop the
product.
The Solution
After an exhaustive 12-month analysis of the offerings of six
prospective providers, TPF Restaurants approved Olympic Software's
Microsoft Dynamics GP Professional solution.
TPF Restaurants' solution included General Ledger, Payables
Management, Receivables Management, Purchase Order Processing,
Fixed Assets, Sales Order Processing, Inventory, Modifier and FRx
Reporting.
The system is hosted at the company's Albany, Auckland premises,
with remote access from the Mangere distribution centre and the
Sydney office via a Citrix MetaFrame based on Microsoft SQL Server
2000.
The Results
The system was installed in four months as planned, and was
within 10% of budget. "Olympic Software assisted with the planning
and implementation of the new system. They proved to be an
excellent partner and provided us with as much support as we
needed. The team was very knowledgeable about the Microsoft Great
Plains solution, and made the project a success," says Group
Finance Manager Matt Buckeridge. "This is one of the best
experiences we have had to date with upgrades."
Since deploying Microsoft Great Plains Professional across the
organisation, TPF has experienced significant productivity gains
through the automation of several front-end tasks, and reduced data
entry, as well as improving the accuracy and value of management
information.
Highlights
- Data entry time savings including processes that take 10
minutes instead of 60, and remove risky and time-consuming manual
data entry
- Streamlined processes, particularly those that are regularly
repeated
- Better information leading to more confident decisions,
including data integrated with other desktop applications and
easy importing and exporting in less than a third of the time
taken by the previous system
- Faster and more flexible reporting - including instantaneous
processes that previously took a day
- Analysis tools delivering more diverse and focused
information
- Accurate real-time stock valuations
