Dream work in motion: “We are blown away by the delivery”
When Australian retirement living provider Keyton needed to stand-up a new software system inside six months to support its finance operations they engaged PerData “without question to get the job done”.
Days earlier, Keyton’s general manager of finance, Kay Marshman, had been tasked to lead the transition to a new, purpose-built application that would facilitate all financial activity across the company’s operations – more than 800 employees and contractors and hundreds of suppliers servicing 76 sites throughout Australia collectively housing more than 17,000 residents.
“It is a large and important organisation that serves a vital role in providing high quality accommodation and lifestyle benefits for older Australians,” Kay said.
“The responsibility to get this right was enormous and keenly felt by everyone.”
Since full divestiture from investment, construction, and real estate multinational Lendlease in 2021, Keyton has been building the infrastructure it needs to operate as a standalone business focused solely on its retirement living assets and clients.
When it was part of Lendlease as Lendlease Retirement Living, its enterprise functions including accounting, financial management, project management, and procurement, were processed through Oracle, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software generally designed for mega-sized companies.
“We needed something much leaner than Oracle for a more agile business, but which still carried high functionality and the capability to seamlessly integrate with our other systems,” Kay said.
“It also had to be tailored to our specific needs, but not so customised that we would be creating a silo or wouldn’t be able to upgrade it in the future.”
The strategic advice from PerData, which had a proven track record implementing other systems across the Keyton network, was to use Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 program as the base tool for Keyton’s enterprise management, with additional purpose-designed configurations.
Kay said she was impressed and comfortable with PerData’s approach from the outset.
“I’m a finance person, not an IT person, but I felt from day one that we were part of a joint partnership, a real team effort,” Kay said.
“There was never any arrogance, no ‘you don’t know what you’re doing, and you should just stay out of it and leave it to the experts’ kind of talk.
“It was always very amicable, a supportive and guiding team that delivered on their promises and never made us feel excluded. In fact, they made us feel critically valued as part of the solution.”
PerData business development manager Michael Woodruff said the customer experience in any projects they undertake had to be positive to ensure success.
He said the customer journey at PerData followed a finely calibrated process that put the customer and the needs of their business at the centre of every conversation well before the PerData team started working on the system.
“It starts with good planning and strategy,” Michael said.
“Done the PerData way, it means we want to know more about your destination goals before we design the vehicle to get you there and plan the journey.
“And once you’re happy with the design and the trip plans, we’ll put you in the driver’s seat, so you have a clear view of the road ahead and unimpeded control.”
Since going live with the D365 system in September 2023, Kay remains delighted with the outcome and the feedback from upper management and the staff who interact with the technology daily, whether that’s submitting purchase orders, invoices, or expense claims through to cap ex requests.
“This is the financial backbone of our business,” Kay said.
“I know it was a lot of hard work, but I’m still amazed that we were able to implement and configure a new system, migrate all data from the old platform into the new one, integrate with our other systems, test, verify and validate, and then train people live and online and then launch to more than 800 users on-time and on budget with no bugs.
“That is a lot of moving parts, and because we worked so closely, we managed them together.
“Not once did I feel like I couldn’t trust the PerData team to make the right decisions in our best interests.
“The result is a new, robust finance system for the future for Keyton. And the feedback from our joint venture business partners and through our CFO is that they are blown away by the delivery.”
