Turners Auctions

Turners Auctions Limited is the largest auction house in New Zealand. For the past 35 years New Zealanders from all walks of life have been discovering the Turners way of buying and selling.

In 2004 alone, Turners Auctions Ltd sold over 85,000 used cars and millions of dollars worth of commercial and industrial products through their 16 branches around the country.

Turners has had an impressive record of growth over the past eight years. Mr Tony Coombe, CFO of Turners said that this is the result of revenue diversification and increased volumes in all areas of the business. Turners business includes the auctioning of vehicles, damaged vehicles, trucks, mobile plant, commercial and industrial equipment and household goods.

Mr Coombe said that it was this growth, together with a need for greater managerial information and a technical environment that was more flexible, that had prompted a review of their technical infrastructure. The review resulted in a decision to replace the existing finance and auction systems.

Turners selected Topaz Solutions to implement Microsoft Business Solutions Navision to meet their financial management information needs. In parallel, Turners also embarked upon the development of a new auction management system (TAMS), which had to be closely integrated with Navision.

Mr Martyn Seddon, IT Manager for Turners said that the extent of integration required between the two systems was significant.

"We needed a solution where the integration was such that it would appear as a single application to users".

The open architecture of the Navision product was one of the major factors in its selection. Mr Seddon stated that despite considerable efforts they had been unable to find a suitable enterprise solution, which incorporated auction functionality, requiring the option of building their own system on the Microsoft .Net platform.

Topaz deployed Navision over a four month period on a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 platform and integrated the solution with TAMS via .Net connectors.

The solution went live at Turners Fleet (a business division of Turners Auctions Ltd) in late 2002, and when the TAMS development was completed it was rolled out to Turners Auctions branches across NZ during 2004.

"Since going live, the Navision solution has delivered all the promised business benefits to the company" said Janet Henderson of Turners.

Microsoft Business Solutions’ Navision applications automate end-to-end business processes across financials, distribution, project accounting, electronic commerce, manufacturing, supply chain management, business intelligence, sales and marketing management and customer service and support.

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