Blending spices requires precision and state-of-the-art machinery. But this pursuit of perfection doesn’t need to cease at the factory floor. Operating for over 100 years, a leading Australian distributor of food ingredients recently reviewed their own operational ingredients — ultimately, embarking on a software transformation that tastes of digital success.
“One of the main reasons we selected Microsoft Dynamics was the ability to handle multiple ERP modules and Power BI — all in one system, which can scale as needed.”
Organisation’s digital transformation lead
Challenge
Since its inception, this leading Australian food distributor has expanded considerably. In addition to multiple branches supplying food manufacturers throughout Australia, the distributor’s reach now includes clients and operations in countries across Asia Pacific and Europe. However, this extraordinary growth had begun to hinder the day-to-day operations of the organisation, due to disparate and siloed systems.
Gathering a team of stakeholders across the business to thoroughly document their challenges, drivers and operational goals, the organisation realised their incumbent enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution was unable to handle their future strategic requirements.
With an appetite for change, the Australian distributor went to market for the right technology partner to meet the needs of their digital transformation and to unify their systems under one modern, cloudbased ERP solution.
Solution
Already using Microsoft Power BI, and impressed with the business intelligence solution’s reporting capabilities, the distributor felt Microsoft Dynamics 365 ticked all the boxes for their ERP solution and was the natural choice.
The organisation’s digital transformation lead said, “One of the main reasons we selected Microsoft Dynamics was the ability to handle multiple ERP modules and Power BI — all in one system, which can scale as needed.”
After extensive research, the distributor selected DXC Technology as their technology partner, based on its considerable experience implementing Dynamics 365 and Power BI for the manufacturing industry. The distributor recognised that the DXC Practice for Microsoft understood the distributor’s pain points. According to the organisation’s spokesperson, “DXC had a strong reputation in the market and really listened to our requirements.”
Deploying Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, the distributor decided to mould many of their operations around the out-of-the-box functionality of Dynamics 365, simplifying their processes and enabling them to benefit from automatic system updates by Microsoft.
The spokesperson said, “One of the main priorities was that everyone within the organisation needed to move away from the old way of thinking and adopt new and simplified processes in line with the out-of-the-box functionality of Dynamics 365; however, we required some minor customisations to suit our business model, and DXC made that happen.”
Outcomes and benefits
Halfway through their global roll-out, the distributor has already achieved significant benefits by moving to Dynamics 365. The organisation has saved time, consolidated resources by automating processes, and improved strategic decision-making as a result of easily accessible, real-time, accurate reporting.
“The old system was causing a lot of issues resulting in high costs for the business because the stock we had in the warehouse wasn’t instantly live. As a consequence, we used to have three to five grand of stock write-offs, but in the first two months of running the new system, we’ve only had $500. We can already see a lot of the benefits of Dynamics 365, and that’s just from a stock management perspective,” said the spokesperson.
In addition, pulling data from the old system used to be time consuming and complex. With powerful, selfservice reports customisable for each employee’s role with Power BI, important data is now available with a click of a button.
The spokesperson explained, “On a Monday morning I used to run a few different reports that might take me 15-20 minutes; now I can just click on it and they’re already there. Even small things like releasing orders might have taken a number of screens to go through in the past, whereas now it’s all in one screen and it’s just a quick click of the button.”
Moving to the Microsoft platform is a shining light for the distributor’s finance team and will provide complete transparency across the business globally. Once the implementation is complete, they will achieve a 360-degree view from one platform, ultimately eliminating the manual consolidation of data and enabling the finance team to focus on strategic business decisions.
A strong, supportive partnership
From the beginning of the project, the distributor has benefited from the DXC Practice for Microsoft’s extensive experience in Dynamics 365 implementations for the manufacturing industry, as well as DXC’s ability to deliver a scalable solution.
“Working with DXC has been extremely good! The delivery team has been very helpful and easy to deal with throughout the whole process. They have a very good knowledge of the systems and made it a lot simpler for us,” said the spokesperson.
Using a phased approach to implement Dynamics 365 across the business, the distributor has been able to action learnings from previous implementations to ensure they improve the delivery and impact throughout the global roll-out.
The spokesperson added, “We are satisfied with the implementation as it moves forward. We were able to take learnings from each delivery and apply them to the next. The last project was live on day one with no issues, and we started using the solution immediately with ease.”
DXC has also facilitated the roll-out of Dynamics 365 continuous updates, as part of Microsoft’s OneVersion program. “The support team runs the updates at 6:00 pm, once we’ve finished our business activities, and we are back online and good to go in the morning. We’ve never been out of action or had an issue.”
Next steps
The distributor considers innovation and technology as propellant for growth and progression. The business will keep leveraging the Microsoft platform, with the plan of introducing a customer relationship management (CRM) system and a customer portal in the future. For its warehousing, the organisation is also looking at barcode scanning, and machine automation and connectivity.
The spokesperson concluded, “We see technology as extremely important in order for us to progress into the future, because without it we’ll probably get caught in the past, so we are constantly working to improve our technological capabilities.”
Experts in blending the right ingredients, the global food distributor’s combination of a core Microsoft platform and DXC partnership is enhancing the organisation’s recipe for future success and growth.