Situation; One time owner of the largest crane rental company worldwide, Ray Anthony had just sold his business and turned his attention to his hobbies. That attention resulted in the purchase of 22 companies, ranging from Speedboat Sales to Tri-Axle Hauling. These 22 businesses were scattered from Florida to Pennsylvania.

At the time of purchase, each company was performing their own accounting functions on a variety of systems. Because the purchases occurred so quickly, it was nearly impossible to set up any kind of consistency among the companies and the new corporate reporting requirements for a single owner quickly became a nightmare. Some of the obstacles that were facing the corporate accounting staff included:

• Inability to consolidate books at period end, often taking more than 3 months to prepare statements
• Collections and cash flow management were daunting tasks since information only existed in local offices
• Maintaining multiple systems in 22 businesses made support expensive and slow
• Management reporting across all organizations was impossible
• Communication among companies was not improving

Enter OPAL Business Solutions

Scott Davidson, Partner for Opal Business Solutions, was assigned the task of centralizing corporate accounting and reporting responsibilities. After carefully identifying the specific objectives for the corporate accounting department, Scott was able to architect a plan that would allow for rapid implementation across all companies while at the same time improving the reporting functions and centralizing IT functions.

The solution focused on Microsoft Great Plains as a result of the powerful customization utilities that allow it to be tailored for nearly any company. FRx and SQL Reports were designed to leverage the scalability of each module, allowing for real time reporting for one or many companies. The entire solution was deployed on 2 servers in the corporate office making use of Citrix thin client technology for the application and Microsoft SQL for the database.

The implementation went very smoothly, and training was accomplished largely in a remote manner using teleconferencing and desktop sharing. One at a time, each company's data was converted and brought live onto the Great Plains platform. The Great Plains software was modified to fit each company however the core components of each module remained the same to leverage consolidated reporting.

Results

Anthony Holdings has very quickly begun to reap considerable benefits. The gains from just period end reporting have proven to be worth the investment. Some highlights are:

• Initial consolidations across all companies took place in less than 6 months, with the entire implementation lasting just over 18 months.
• Period end reporting went from 3+ months to less than 10 business days.
• The corporate accounting staff has had the resources to improve collection times by nearly 25%.
• Multi-company management reports with real time balances for Inventory, Cash Flow and Collections are now generated daily in under 5 minutes.
• Centralization of accounting records has reduced the annual audit / tax bill by 55%.

The Information Technology requirements have also been sharply reduced.

• Upgrades are done on one central server during off-peak hours, eliminating all downtime for 15 remote users.
• The entire help desk and Support functions have been outsourced for a fraction of the cost of a single Network Administrator