BS: So, what was the business problem you wanted to solve?
DS: I think like a lot of owner-managed businesses it was very very successful, very very profitable and James [McAllister, the owner] certainly had a clear view of the sales and marketing function and the operational side of the business. However his financial systems were, shall we say, slightly outdated - which is another way of saying they were virtually non-existent. He appointed me as financial controller seven years ago on the advice of [business advisory company] Grant Thornton.

We were running on Sage [accounting software], which is fairly bullet-proof and again fairly standard for owner-managed businesses, but not particularly flexible.

So we set about putting some procedures and controls in, got the in-house reporting up to speed and then tried to develop all of that ... and realised Sage was creaking a little bit. Another problem was that each of the parks had been allowed to almost do their own thing with very little control over them. So four years ago we put Navision financials in, which we bought from Cedilla Systems (cedilla.co.uk).

BS: How did you find the system you wanted?
DS: We went through the usual beauty parade of software providers - looked at Great Plains, looked at Access, liked Navision, particularly liked Cedilla, who we felt would value us as a client. The financials we put in for about £60,000, which was a very good investment.

BS: How long did that take?
DS: Start to finish, less than six months.

BS: So what benefits have you noticed?
DS: In terms of the financials we were able to get management accounts out within eight working days - pretty much when the implementation went in. We went live on February 1, which is the first of our financial year and at the end of each month we're getting management accounts within eight working days [compared to 12 or 13 days previously]. At the same time as putting Navision in we reorganised how we structured the company in terms of departments. We identified key budget holders and gave those budget holders access to the financial information directly online.

BS: So did you take the technology any further in the organisation?
DS: The success of the financials was better than I'd ever anticipated. The budget holders and of course the board were delighted with the speed and accuracy of the information.

We then reorganised the company three years ago, and each of the parks came under the control of one or another operations director who became responsible for everything to do with that. That had proved very successful, but there were a lot of inefficiencies within that structure: at one stage we had two marketing managers. We flattened the whole structure and went to 'discipline directors' - we had a sales and marketing director and an operations director who were responsible for the whole company.

We were running on a piece of software written locally for all of our sales and marketing information. It wasn't very flexible. Because of the structure which we were operating under, this piece of software had developed at tangents depending on each of the directors' needs. We thought, right, let's go the next stage and move over to Navision sales and marketing, which will then integrate with our financials. And for the last 12-18 months we've been working on that, going live on 1 March this year.

BS: Have you noticed any benefits yet?
DS: Huge. The response from the end user has been tremendous. For example if you look at the front desk we were on a Kalamazoo-based system, which worked but had a phenomenal amount of manual input - and not very professional-looking when we were giving little Kalamazoo receipts to our customers, who had spent a lot of money buying a caravan from us.

We've now been able to have computer-printed receipts with the park logo, so if they come in and buy a gas bottle on the front desk, the money is recorded, they're given a professional-looking receipt and the money is automatically updated directly into the nominal ledger, so absolutely no manual input at all between front desk and accounts. The beauty of the whole integrated system is that all of the directors, all of the senior managers can access the information at any time from any location.

BS: Does that represent a large saving?
DS: We've stripped a quarter of a million out of the business, and we're budgeted this year to strip another half a million out. That's because of the system and because of a number of organisational things we've done.

So we've been delighted with the implementation and the response from our users - the salesmen, the receptionists and even our groundsmen who are using it for the job system - has been phenomenal. I suppose if I had to put my finger on any one benefit it has been the extremely positive effect it's had on teamwork throughout the whole company.