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The Decision Makers View

Accounting Technology, May 2002, by Robert Scott McHutchison, a 100-year-old horticultural brokerage company, has one of the more unusual inventory problems of any company that is involved with living, green things."The only time I want to see a plant is if it ends up in my office," says Mike Tizio, president of the Ridgefield, N.J.-based company. "We buy and sell plants, but we only do it on paper."McHutchison never touches the plants. It matches buyers and sellers who have a wide variety of products and a constantly changing product line.A staff of 35 field sales reps drives McHutchison’s business, which hit $41 million in revenue last year and is expected to reach $45.5 million this year. These reps serve 3,500 horticultural customers and the company does business with 400 vendors. It was these numbers, coupled with a large number of transactions that drove the company to change accounting systems last year.For five years, the company used the SBT Pro Series, but the product ran out of gas. It would sometimes drop lines and records."We needed a system that was flexible and robust," says Tizio. That meant a program that could handle 400 different vendors "with 400 different pricing programs, including early order discount pricing, method of shipping pricing, and quantity discounts where there might be seven price levels."The company rejected higher-end systems as too expensive and too inflexible. After an IT staffer attended a show, the company began looking at Navision Financials (now called Attain), represented by New York City reseller Business Management International. Tizio notes that the location of the reseller was also a part of the decision. BMI has an office four miles from Ridgefield."We were looking for a service provider that was local so we could talk to them face-to-face if we had problems," he says. When it came to software flexibility, "We said to them, this is the way we do business. Can you modify your program to our way of doing business?’" recalls Tizio.He was assured that Navision could be modified to meet McHutchison’s needs, and the implementation began in March and went live in August with virtually no problems. The company spent $375,000, including $112,000 in software license fees. Tizio considers it money well spent because over the five years with SBT, the company had spent three times that amount.All 85 of the company’s employees are users, in particular the sales reps, who can add their orders from the field. The system is accessible over the Internet via Citrix.The payback? "I’ve been able to increase my sales 25 percent over the last two and a half years," says Tizio. Having a better system allowed him to add the sales reps to grow revenue, without the need to add office staff.

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