NHP surfaces telemetry in Microsoft Dynamics 365 with DXC IP

NHP Electrical Engineering Products (NHP) is an Australian company that specialises in motor control, power distribution, and automation systems. With 55 years of electrical and engineering industry excellence, and more than 20 branches across Australia and New Zealand, NHP is both a local manufacturer and supplier of leading local and international products.

The business employs approximately 800 people and supplies all major industries, including manufacturing, water and wastewater, food and beverage, mining, packaging, and defence. NHP goes to market with over 20,000 marketed lines and works with an extensive network of global partners to offer choice in product, technology, service, support, and, ultimately, choice in how clients deal with them, where and when they are needed.

Challenge

NHP is a privately-owned Australian company that views technology as a profit centre, rather than a cost centre. This means the IT department has large support from the board to leverage IT, which has accelerated digital transformation and the organisation’s move to the cloud.

When NHP migrated to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations (D365 FO), there were multiple Microsoft, cloud-based, and legacy integration points that had to be implemented across the business. In D365 FO alone, there are tens of thousands of possible configuration settings, and integration control can be extremely complex to assess, track, and manage.

Unlike servers that are physically located on-premises that allow IT teams to easily review and investigate performance issues, there is significantly reduced visibility and control over the telemetry of cloud-based and Software as a Service (SAAS) systems.

This meant that, while this complex integration was possible, the IT team had no way to surface the telemetry within the platform to proactively monitor the integration points, review performance, and solve problems before they occurred. Instead, with only limited visibility available, performance was impaired, applications could crash unexpectedly, and the IT team could not guarantee uptime of a system that’s integral to the entire organisation, as it controls orders, invoicing, and cash flow.

Looking for a way to gain better visibility into Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, the organisation worked with DXC Technology to create a solution that surfaced the telemetry held in the cloud-based platform.

Solution

Having reached a point in its IT maturity where IT performance monitoring can be proactive to increase productivity, efficiencies, and profit margins—rather than reacting to issues—NHP turned to the DXC Practice for Microsoft for a solution. With extensive knowledge of its IT requirements and deeply embedded within the company, DXC is a trusted IT partner of NHP having previously supported the organisation’s digital transformation and migration to the cloud.

Bernard Moloney, IT Application Support Manager, NHP, said, “We needed a way to identify performance issues before they became a problem. When a company moves to the cloud, it no longer has the control over software that existed when everything was run through on-premises servers. NHP wanted to be able to access the full telemetry within Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations and write its own reports based on its key measures. This would let the team review how the environment was performing based on its specific business needs and metrics. The result NHP was looking for was the ability to proactively monitor the system so that it could improve user experience and streamline finance and operations without IT disruptions.”

Taking inspiration from the .NET world, DXC created a solution that leveraged the well-tested telemetry gathering and analysis tool: Azure Application Insight. DXC’s Insights for D365 FO solution allowed NHP to capture telemetry on user behaviour, batch job execution, system SQL performance and gave them the ability to add their own metrics and monitoring of custom scenarios.

Outcomes and benefits

The solution quickly proved its value. “The team rarely receives phone calls from users celebrating that everything is working well. In IT, the rule of thumb is generally that no news is good news. If everything is working well, employees can do their jobs,” explains Moloney. “A mature IT environment can look beyond the reactive to add value to the business as a profit centre. That is where the organisation is and what DXC’s Insights for D365 FO is achieving.”

Moloney shares a key example that highlights Insights for D365 FO in action. “One of the roles of Finance and Operations is to release backorders,” he explains. “It’s a critical role. The entire world is experiencing supply chain issues and so it’s important to release backorders as quickly as possible when stock comes in. Batch jobs run in the background and are then released. However, in this case, there was a problem with one order, and it blocked the entire batch. There was no error code, which meant—without telemetry—the team had no way of knowing it had happened.

“Before its ability to access this level of detail and visibility, the team would not have noticed that a batch of orders had not been released, as the batch had run without errors. It would have taken clients calling and complaining, and a large amount of manual effort to identify where the problem was and what had happened. Instead, the team proactively identified and solved the issue before a customer even realised there was a potential problem. NHP now runs this specific query on a regular basis to surface this information, streamlining the release process and ensuring its clients receive their orders in a timely manner.”

Now that Insights for D365 FO has been substantially tested in the batch job monitoring space, Moloney and his team will investigate what other applications the solution can be used for within the business. “We use an extensive range of Microsoft tools and solutions,” he says. “One of the company’s focuses is to avoid technical debt, and so the team test and prove any new solution rigorously before finding other applications for it. Accessing this level of telemetry in a cloud solution is a game changer for us and the team are already reviewing where else it can be leveraged within the organisation.”

NHP leverages a broad suite of Microsoft applications across its business and views DXC as a partner, rather than simply a supplier. When the company has a problem that it needs to solve, it turns to DXC and Microsoft first.

Moloney says, “DXC’s team had identified that this problem exists for businesses that have migrated to the cloud, just as NHP did. The requirement to be able to see exactly what is happening in an IT environment is still there but, when everything is cloud-based, the control is gone. This solution solves that. It has been developed with a deep understanding of Microsoft products and gives the visibility mature IT organisations are looking for to proactively increase performance. NHP was very happy to work with DXC to create this solution, not only for its business, but because it’s so necessary in a cloud-based, working environment.”