Australian Export Consortia

Australian Export Consortia (AEC) is an Australian success story that has been operating for the last 40 years. AEC are a geographically diverse business operating across the APAC region, the Indian Ocean and in the Middle East.



Working in the Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) industry, and distributing a variety of products including pharmacy and over the counter products, AEC is involved in the distribution management and marketing of hundreds of brands. AEC represent many well known and recognizable brands such as Kelloggs, Johnson and Johnson and is a long established exporter from Australia to major global markets.

With their unique set of business requirements, a complex business structure and diversity of their operations, it is no wonder that the business required an accounting software solution that could deal with the complexities and sophistication of their organisation. Geographically spread from Melbourne to Papua New Guinea and beyond, AEC needed to ensure that it was equipped and ready for future growth. To stay ahead of the pack they decided that it was time to move from their current accounting system Arrow Financials to Tencia.

Key to the future

“We were looking to have more timely information available to us and for our reporting to be less labour intensive, we decided that updating our software would be beneficial to the business to ensure that we were prepared for any future growth.  We were looking for a flexible new tool that would help us manage our business well into the future.” Explained Mr. Craig Weinert.

Working closely with their Arrow Business Partner, Logon Australia, AEC decided that it was time to upgrade to Tencia. Craig Weinert, Marketing Director at AEC said: “The transition to the new system was good from an operational point of view. It was embraced positively by staff who felt very comfortable using Tencia. They were familiar with Arrow Financials so there was less resistance to this change”.

The long history with their Arrow Business Partner allowed AEC to feel more comfortable about the upgrade to Tencia. “Like all things there are always concerns when moving financial data and introducing new IT systems. Our transition process was relatively smooth, there were some teething problems initially but whenever there were questions or issues support was on hand and they were able to responding quickly to our concerns. Initially there were a couple of staff members hesitant to this change but they are now on board and really do prefer Tencia to the old system”.



Delivering results

Noticeable changes and improvements that Tencia has been able to deliver for AEC include; increased flexibility in reporting, access to real time data and much greater depth in both the Stock and Debtors areas of the system. “Tencia captures important information especially when it comes to parent child reporting.  Previous processes restricted these reports to the end of month but with Tencia we can generate these at any time.” said Mr Weinert.

“The drill-down features in Tencia are very useful and having transactions updating the General ledger in real time has improved our business processes and reduced the pressure on our administration team to have management accounts ready.  Tencia’s multi-company consolidation feature has also been useful as it has streamlined processes into a single button feature providing instant information for the business.” explained Mr Weinert.

Future Enhancements

AEC will continue to implement more foreign currency features and is particularly interested in the profit and loss on currency exchange feature that Tencia offers. This will enable administrators and management to be able to see the effect of their decisions when buying foreign currencies.

With over 10,000 stock items and advanced stock control requirements it’s no wonder AEC are continuously looking for ways to streamline their processes and improve their business. From a management point of view, they are still working towards tapping into the full potential of Tencia as more and more staff members adopt the new system.