The Business
A provider of Executive placements in the UK, Europe, and Asia, the organisation has over 150 employees in 5 International offices. Principal sectors they operate in include Technology, Financial and Insurance, from their inception 20 years ago they now turnover more than £50M per annum.
The Challenges
As the organisation had grown, the need to better manage financial transactions, together with the need for better reporting and business intelligence, resulted in a decision to transition their existing Sage Finance system to a comprehensive mid-market Finance solution. The following prerequisites when assessing potential solutions were essential:
- The solution should have excellent ‘drill down and across’ capabilities to enable users to quickly and easily assimilate information from across the entire solution.
- The solution should have comprehensive reporting and Business Intelligence capabilities within the core application.
- The solution should have workflow capability to enable, for example, the authorisation of purchase requisitions, payment of supplier invoices, approval of expense submissions, etc.
- The solution should encompass Human Resource Management capability.
- The solution should have the potential of being able to link to the existing timesheet applications.
- Streamline payments to both suppliers and reconcile Bank Statements and automatically match payments made.
- Multi-lingual and currency capabilities for the Asian Offices.
Following a review of leading Finance software providers, Microsoft Dynamics was selected due to its proven functionality and capabilities to meet their key objectives. Advantage was selected to implement Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, because of understanding of the Professional Services sector, years of experience with Microsoft Dynamics solutions, and close proximity to their Head Office in Central London.
The Benefits
The Microsoft Dynamics solution was successfully implemented and some of the benefits realised by the Microsoft solution deployed by Advantage were:
- Reduction in the customers’ software billing cycle workload using the standard functionality within the solution for Bank payments and Statements import.
- Implementation of a solution that enabled the organisation to considerably expand without additional demand being placed upon the finance team overheads.
- Improved reporting and Business Intelligence capability was inherent within the solution, to enable the organisation to quickly export and analyse data at a glance.
- Seamless integration with the Time Sheet booking solution, reducing manual input of data.
- 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.
The major improvements gained from the move to Business Central were commented on by the Financial Director at this professional services executive recruitment company who said “We’re delighted with the fact that we’ve managed to dramatically reduce our billing cycle workload through the use of Microsoft Dynamics. From the start of the project right through to the end of it, Advantage helped support us every step of the way and helped to keep things on track and within budget. Furthermore, we were thoroughly impressed with the levels of knowledge and expertise of Microsoft Technologies in their team. If you are asking me would I use Advantage again for a project like this again? Absolutely without a doubt”.
Martyn Kemp, New Business Sales & Account Manager at Advantage added “What a pleasure it was for our team here at Advantage to work with such a forward-thinking company who wanted to revolutionise the way they used technology across their business. We are delighted with the vast improvements that have been seen in terms of efficiency. In addition to this, we enjoyed working with them so much we even continue to support their system to make sure that it is the best thing it can be going forwards”.
Conclusion
As clearly demonstrated from the above case study, this professional services executive recruitment company have been happy with their move to the mid-market Finance solution, Business Central with Advantage.
As a result of their successful implementation of their new Business Central ERP system, they have already seen a dramatic reduction in the customers’ software billing cycle workload, reduced the manual inputting of data as well as a significant improvement in both the overall efficiency and productivity across the company. As a Microsoft Gold partner, Advantage continue to support this Business Central solution to make sure that they are using it to its full potential.
