A challenge to the status quo helped uncover Greentree‘s remarkable potential for efficiency gains at the UK‘s largest representative body of publishing industry participants.The Publishers Association (PA) is the leading trade organisation serving book, journal and electronic publishers in the UK. When Mark Wharton, Director of Operations, joined the organisation a year or so ago, he brought the value of a fresh pair of eyes. After getting to grips with the manual and tediously time-consuming process of report production, he was convinced there must be a better way.Although the PA had been Greentree customers prior to his arrival, Mark was certain that the organisation had barely scratched the surface of Greentree‘s true capability. After all, the original buy decision was based on Greentree‘s ability to meet the membership-based funding structure without the need for significant customisation. To help discover more of what Greentree had to offer, he called upon the expertise of the local Greentree Business Partner.Mark‘s first task was to seek salvation from manually extracting data and reentering it into various spreadsheets before he could produce reports for scrutiny by the board of directors. It was a revelation to discover that Greentree‘s Excel integration allowed for the extraction of data out of Greentree with the automatic population of Excel spreadsheets. Data could be manipulated and analysed as required, before being exported and mapped to a pre-defined report format. Mark envisages that the efficiency gains will be huge, as “this process alone used to take days but we expect that, once we‘ve got it set-up correctly, it will be reduced to hours.”He also expects the accuracy and integrity of organisational data will be greatly improved. This means management and directors will have the peace-of-mind confidence in the reliability of reporting information for decision making. This initial reporting revelation provided the catalyst for further investigation into what else could be achieved within Greentree.The discovery of Greentree‘s online banking capability has presented an opportunity to look more closely at how the PA is performing in other key operational areas. Previously, hundreds of hours of staff time were consumed writing cheques, reconciling bank statements and chasing approvals and un-presented and lost cheques each month. The PA payment mandate also required payments above a pre-determined limit to be authorised by an internal staff member and a director or board member. This often required cheques to be couriered to various locations and back again.The implementation of Electronic Banking immediately removed the need to write hundreds of cheques and the e-approvals module will allow over-limit invoices to be authorised online by the appropiate person. Obviously, this will reduce the administrative time absorbed by the payment process but Mark‘s keen to take things a step further by exploring the possibility of exporting the online payments data directly out of Greentree into the banking system.Mark‘s convinced that by streamlining the electronic banking and payment systems from end-to-end, the true potential of Electronic Banking efficiencies will be fully realised. He expects the cumulative impact of the time and cost savings on the bottom-line will be thousands of pounds yearly.