Toro Australia selects Promadis to develop and implement its critical commercial equipment Service Management System

16 October 2006

Leading mower, turf care and irrigation specialist Toro Australia has this month commenced the introduction of a comprehensive new IT system designed to deliver improved customer service and major efficiencies for its national equipment service operation.

To be designed, implemented and supported by Promadis, the new computer application is based on that software company's suite of general business applications software. However, extensive customization is also being carried out to ensure a precise fit to Toros detailed and distinct business requirements and to facilitate a fully comprehensive integration with its worldwide corporate ERP system, supplied by SAP.

A subsidiary of The Toro Company, headquartered in Minnesota USA, the Australian organization has been established for over 40 years. During that time it has grown to become the nation's largest supplier of irrigation products to the landscape, agricultural, sports turf and domestic household garden sectors. This is complemented by an extensive range of mowers and turf care equipment that caters for an equally broad range of golf, sporting, municipal, professional landscape contractor and residential markets.

A vital facet of Toro's Australian business is the after-market service and related support, which its commercial equipment and consumer divisions offer to clients. This includes the provision of flexible maintenance contracts designed and tailored to meet the often highly diverse requirements of different users.

However, as financial controller Mr. Mel Tickle explains, this part of the business is unique to Australia. "In North America, with its much larger market, service is typically provided by our dealer network. Locally, in contrast, we are much closer to our end customers and it's very appropriate for us to provide this important function directly.

"The implication of this uniqueness from an IT perspective is that we have not been able to call on standard corporate software tools to help us manage the service activity. Instead we had to rely on a range of totally un-integrated systems including spreadsheets, to do what we need to do. It's been a process that we've come to facetiously refer to internally as 'hand embroidering our data'.

"Inherent inefficiencies with this approach plus our continued business growth necessitated investigation in the creation of a unique software solution to far better meet our unique requirements. Our considered choice being to implement the customized solution proposed by Promadis.

"When fully installed, early next year, this is slated to deliver a range of benefits that will substantially improve customer service and enhance our overall day-to-day management of the service function. For example, we will have a far more comprehensive, up to date and accurate view of everything that is happening right around Australia. Among other things, this will greatly assist in our allocation of specialist resources and skills and make us far more responsive to customer requirements and feedback to those customers.

"We will also substantially streamline administration and control procedures as well as eliminating the arduous, error prone and time consuming duplication of data entry that is currently unavoidable. In turn, the introduction of barcode scanning for jobs and work in progress will significantly simplify admin tasks for our service technicians.

"Most importantly, the new system will also be totally integrated with our corporate SAP system and help with our conformance to the requirements of the US Sarbanes-Oxley legislation for company administration", Mr. Tickle noted.