The Organisation
This Not-For-Profit organisation encourages the promotion of bilateral trade and investment for British companies. Services include certification and legalisation of trade documents, customised research and advice, visas, seminars, workshops, conferences and networking opportunities.
The Challenge
The organisation had grown since its inception in the mid-70s, but with a lean Finance department was struggling to meet the growing financial transactional processing and reporting requirements of the organisation.
Further challenges included:
- The legacy version of Sage was not compatible with Making Tax Digital (MTD).
- The legacy Sage finance system resided on Windows XP devices out of support by Microsoft.
- Fixed Assets functionality was being managed via manual spreadsheets.
- Inherent integration between Sage and Excel was not available, increasing the manual data entry requirement and potential data entry errors.
Picking Advantage
After making the decision to migrate to a Cloud orientated Microsoft Dynamics solution to align with a strategy for Microsoft technologies, the organisation adopted a search and selection process with potential partners that were able to meet key criteria:
- A partner with a proven track record in similar organisations, ideally based in Central London.
- Experience with the delivery and support of Cloud based Finance / ERP solutions
- Provide proactive Account Management to drive the organisation forwards and act as an advocate for Microsoft technologies.
- Provision of a proactive support desk, with inherent accountancy skills as well as deep functional knowledge and experience of Microsoft Dynamics.
Following a review of leading UK Partners, Advantage was selected to implement the Microsoft Dynamics solution. Furthermore, Advantage continues to provide ongoing business continuity support to this day.
The Benefits
The Microsoft Dynamics Cloud-based solution was successfully implemented within a short timeframe. Some of the benefits realised by the Microsoft solution and move to Advantage were:
- Improved reporting and Business Intelligence capability was inherent within the solution, to enable the organisation to quickly export and analyse data at a glance.
- Provided organisational efficiency – it is critical that time delays for the day to day running of the business were minimised to focus on business-critical tasks.
- Provided a solution that was truly Cloud based and could be utilised with a simple web browser.
- Implementation of a solution that enabled the organisation to expand without additional demand placed upon the finance team overheads.
The above benefits achieved were commented on by the Financial Director at this not-for-profit Chamber of Commerce organisation who said “We’re pleased to have a cloud-based ERP system that will help us to achieve all we set out to do as a business. During the implementation of Microsoft Dynamics, we’re extremely happy with the way the project was not only managed but how each step of the project was explained to us throughout the process. As for the team itself, we couldn’t have been happier with Advantage’s expertise and depth of knowledge in making the transition as smooth as possible. We are so pleased with the results that if anyone is looking for a reliable and leading Microsoft Gold partner to implement Microsoft Dynamics for them, we wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Advantage”.
Martyn Kemp, New Business Sales & Account Manager at Advantage further added “I was extremely pleased for this not-for-profit Chamber of Commerce organisation in making the transition to a fully cloud-based ERP system that could meet their ever-changing business requirements. It is no cliché in saying that this project has been a complete gamechanger for them and helped them to fully mobilise their business. In addition to this, this reliable technology is backed up by the team of dedicated Dynamics experts here at Advantage to allow them to gain the full use of their new scalable ERP system”.
Conclusion
As mentioned above, this not-for-profit Chamber of Commerce organisation have not regretted their decision to make the transition from Sage to Microsoft Dynamics ERP.
As a result of having their new Microsoft Dynamics system in place, they have significantly improved their reporting and business intelligence capability as well as their overall efficiency. Advantage continue to work with this organisation to make sure that it's running smoothly and being used to its full potential.
