The Organisation
This professional services organisation delivers digital marketing within the housing sector, both rental and purchase, across the south east of England. Their services assist Estate Agents to more effectively market and rent/sell their portfolios.
The Challenge
The organisation had moved from a simple legacy Sage application to a cloud-based version of Sage. The resultant project was a failure in terms of solution availability. They suffered performance issues and the application would be unavailable for significant periods - unacceptable for a rapidly growing business.
The Finance Director had previously successfully worked with Microsoft Dynamics NAV, but was keen to retain a Cloud based solution. The logical answer was to review Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, as the solution had evolved from Dynamics NAV and was a true SaaS Cloud-based solution.
Some major requirements of the finance solution were the ability to upload thousands of sales and purchase journal transactions from Excel into the finance solution each month, together with the requirement to submit their VAT returns via MTD. Finally, the growth of the organisation and the lack of consistent availability of the incumbent Sage application increased the pressure to deploy a solution quickly and efficiently.
Picking Advantage
After making the decision to migrate to a Microsoft Dynamics solution, 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 within the M25.
- Consultant availability to commence the project quickly, and deploy a Cloud based Microsoft finance solution.
- Ability to provide extensions to the solution for the import of high-volume journal entries.
- 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:
- The solution was extremely reliable in terms of uptime (guaranteed at 99.95% by Microsoft), and performance was good.
- Improved reporting and Business Intelligence capability was inherent within the solution.
- Provide 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;
- Flexible reporting - to enable the organisation to quickly export and analyse data at a glance;
- Implementation of a solution that enabled the organisation to expand without additional demand placed upon the finance team overheads.
The benefits gained above were reflected by the Financial Director at this professional services organisation who commented “We’re extremely pleased that we now have a reliable ERP system in place to help us achieve our business goals. We can’t thank Advantage enough for the way they took our problems with our old ERP system and transformed them into a working solution through Business Central. We were thoroughly impressed with the way they handled our Business Central project and demonstrated what a great end to end provider they really are. There is no doubt in our minds that we would recommend Advantage to any other business looking for a reliable ERP partner.”
Martyn Kemp, New Business Sales & Account Manager was evidently delighted “I have to say that it was an absolute pleasure working with this professional services organisation to make the move from Sage to Business Central which has clearly brought them a whole host of benefits. Furthermore, this game changing technology is fully supported by our team of specialists here at Advantage to ensure that they are getting the very most out of this new system.”
Conclusion
This professional services organisation remains confident in the selection of Microsoft Dynamics for its Finance solution.
After the implementation of their new Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central system, they have seen better uptime in their solution, dramatically improved their reporting as well as their overall organisational efficiency and seen a significant reduction in the overall finance team overheads. Advantage continue to fully support this solution in order to make that sure that they get the very most out of it in the long term.
