FarmMark steps into a new era with MYOB Advanced Construction
Read how livestock industry experts FarmMark use MYOB Advanced Construction to track and manage projects efficiently and improve inventory workflows.
- One system, two businesses – moving towards consolidated reporting
- Real-time project management – better tracking, more comprehensive forecasting
- Automated workflows – teams can work more efficiently
If you work in the livestock industry, you’ve likely come across FarmMark. Over the past 20 years, the company has forged a reputation as the leading supplier of livestock production solutions in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands.
In July 2020, FarmMark merged with agricultural shed design and construction company Santrev, almost doubling its team overnight. While the two companies continue to operate separately, behind the scenes a lot of work is happening to bring the brands together under one operational roof.
Service Delivery Manager Kate West and Accountant/Contracts Administrator Malorie Ralph work across both companies. Here they share how the merger highlighted system and processing issues and how upgrading to MYOB Advanced Construction has solved some of them.
Kate West
Service Delivery Manager
Malorie Ralph
Accountant/Contracts Administrator
Growing company gets more complex
For the past eight years, FarmMark had used MYOB AccountRight. The system performed well, but the business was outgrowing it. When the company merged with Santrev and its operations expanded, it saw an opportunity to improve its systems and processes.
“Primarily, we’re a projects-based company,” explains Kate. “While MYOB AccountRight provided basic financial processing, it didn’t have the project management functionality our growing business needs.”
Day-to-day, the accounts team gathered data manually and produced spreadsheets to extract the information they needed for budgets and forecasting. This was not only time consuming, but it also didn’t give them in-depth reporting, which the management team needed for decision-making.
“So, we were using different add-ons to try and plug those gaps,” Malorie explains.
MYOB Advanced Construction: all-in-one package
When Kate came across MYOB Advanced Construction, she noticed it had one thing that most other systems couldn’t offer.
“We were looking for a system with both project and inventory management, and that was quite challenging to find,” she says. “All the other systems only had one or the other, and we really wanted an all-encompassing system.”
The company also chose to add MYOB Advanced Payroll and reap the benefits of a scalable and secure cloud payroll solution. On top of that, Malorie says that the fact that MYOB Advanced Construction has customer relationship management functionality was another strong selling point.
Once FarmMark had decided on MYOB Advanced Construction, they engaged Momentum Software Solutions to help with implementation. Malorie says there was a lot of back-end work involved, but Momentum made it a straightforward process.
“Rather than sending the data off to another company, Momentum has all these templates that need to be populated. It was great during implementation because you understood from the start all the different components that make up the different workflows in the system.”
Blair Habberjam, MYOB Advanced Lead Consultant for Momentum Software Solutions says, “The FarmMark team were great to work with; they knew what they wanted and involved the relevant staff throughout the process to ensure they were covering their bases and getting a system that ultimately met their needs. Regular communication was a key part of the successful delivery of this project.”
The feedback from FarmMark’s users has been unanimously positive: “Everybody likes how user-friendly MYOB Advanced Construction is. One staff member said they like how it prompts you when you haven’t completed all required information. Someone else commented on its great search and filtering functions.”
A complete view of project details
With MYOB Advanced Construction, FarmMark can now efficiently manage budgets, projects and contracts. It can access real-time details of individual projects and job costing, ensuring its projects remain on track and within budget – no spreadsheets involved.
“It’s all information that we couldn’t see before without exporting and manipulating data,” says Kate. “With MYOB Advanced Construction, we can easily drill down into individual tasks within a project or build reports that give us a high-level snapshot.”
New functionality provides a clear audit trail
Another benefit is the improved sales order processing. Before, it was a largely paper-based process that often relied on one person completing a task before the next steps could be taken. Now, there’s a lot more accountability, Malorie says.
“The warehouse team can confirm all items have been received with the click of a button. Then accounts can approve the invoice. There’s no longer a delay between the goods coming into the warehouse and the AP bill processing.”
That means the business has a clear digital audit trail (no paper back-ups required), and from an operational perspective, the warehouse and accounts teams can perform their jobs more efficiently.
“One of the things I like most about MYOB Advanced Construction is that you can see the purchase order, sales order, shipment confirmation and invoice in one system without opening multiple windows and risking documents being overridden,” Malorie explains. “Overall, it means we have better version control, despite the volume of transactions we deal with.”
Bringing two businesses together
Six months on from implementation, FarmMark is still unlocking the potential of its new ERP system. Currently, the accounts team is producing separate reports for the board of directors, but the plan is to have both FarmMark and Santrev working in the same system.
“That’s the ultimate goal,” says Kate. “MYOB Advanced Construction is ticking lots of the boxes we were hoping it would.”
Malorie adds: “We just need to spend a bit more time learning the ins and outs of the system before we bring Santrev on board. But we know when we do that, we’ll be able to work even more efficiently.”
Improvements since implementing MYOB Advanced Construction and MYOB Advanced Payroll:
- One system, two businesses – moving towards consolidated reporting
- Real-time project management – better tracking, more comprehensive forecasting
- Improved inventory processing – creates a clear audit trail
- Automated workflows – teams can work more efficiently