The Heico Companies streamlines operations and makes data-led decisions using Microsoft Dynamics 365

Individual organizations often find major transformation projects complex. The Heico Companies has 60 businesses in its portfolio — each with different markets, products and existing technology infrastructures. The executive teams at the Heico Companies recognized an opportunity to use intelligent business applications to simplify their finance and operations. With Microsoft Dynamics 365, the US-based holding company is centralizing and standardizing its approach to finance across its global network of companies while also improving operational processes. 

A diverse portfolio, complex technologies

The Heico Companies is a family-run organization that boasts a global portfolio of 60 operating companies that were acquired over 40 years of operation. The Heico Companies makes long-term investments in these companies, using its resources to help them boost performance and profit while maintaining their own independence and cultures. Each has its own markets, sales channels and strategies.

This decentralized approach is ideal for the portfolio companies, but with so many different types of legacy technologies, top-level monitoring of finances, supply chains and other key business processes becomes complex. To simplify this, The Heico Companies organized its companies into four reporting platforms based on their offerings, each with its own executive management team.

“Our diversity is our strength,” says Barbara Philibert, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Industrial Technologies Group, one of The Heico Companies’s reporting platforms. “But that can also be a challenge when you’re trying to implement new technologies.”

Leadership at The Heico Companies recognized an opportunity to simplify operations, create efficiencies and drive down costs by adopting a consistent approach to technology across the portfolio. With many of its business units already using Microsoft products, the company’s leadership team chose to centrally deploy Microsoft Dynamics 365 applications and other Microsoft services to help provide the improved transparency, insight and control that it wanted.

A five-year plan

Many of the on-premises enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications at The Heico Companies had been in place for years — sometimes decades — and each had been heavily customized. The Heico Companies chose Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management to help kick-start a five-year transformation plan, a strategy that focused on boosting analytics, business process optimization, cost-effectiveness and security.

Still, with dozens of systems across 60 companies, each with its own unique cultures and often conservative approaches to technology, The Heico Companies faced a daunting organizational change management effort. “Often, changes like these are a response to a major problem in a business,” says Philibert. “But we’ve been very successful with our legacy systems, so we had to clearly communicate the value of this transformation.”

To achieve this, The Heico Companies formed a Program Management Office (PMO) — a centralized team that oversees the work and uses organizational change management techniques to secure buy-in and help projects run smoothly. Two of The Heico Companies’s four reporting platforms are working with DXC Technology, a Gold competency member of the Microsoft Partner Network, on their implementations. “It’s a great partnership,” says Narula. “DXC really looks out for The Heico Companies’s best interests and gives us pragmatic, data-led recommendations. We’ve also received tremendous assistance and guidance from the Microsoft FastTrack team and its Customer Success Management team, helping us to be proactive in addressing any potential challenges.”

So far, The Heico Companies has successfully deployed Dynamics 365 at two manufacturing companies and two holding entities, on schedule and under budget, and it has used its new, intelligent business applications to standardize key business processes such as costing, order management and profit monitoring. For companies where a customer relationship management system makes sense, the customer engagement apps in Dynamics 365 are also being implemented as part of the transformation.

“We’re using Dynamics 365 Finance to streamline our financial reporting,” says Saugaat Narula, Vice President of the Program Management Office at The Heico Companies. “We can now quickly generate detailed insights into the profitability of individual businesses, products and customers, which was very difficult to do in our original environment.”

The first of the companies to implement Dynamics 365 was Bartell Machinery Systems, a specialty industrial equipment manufacturer, which went live in February 2020. With much of the deployment process already in place, such as data and business process mapping, the team has now identified ways to accelerate the program for other companies.

“We’ve built a toolkit for how we approach deployment,” says Narula. “With Dynamics 365, we can apply a common design for each company and adapt it to meet individual requirements. The implementation is easily scalable and repeatable.”

Centralized and standardized processes

Moving away from traditional systems is reducing The Heico Companies' technology debt because it no longer must maintain or replace aging ERPs. Deep insight into its data is helping the organization’s leadership make more informed decisions about its future, too.

With regards to Finance, each individual subsidiary company can gain faster visibility into profits and cash flows to make its own intelligent decisions about pricing, sourcing and more. Teams can also share that insight with top-level decision makers at The Heico Companies so they can adapt their group-wide business approaches more quickly and accurately.

These internal benefits also translate into improvements in the customer experience. “By deploying Dynamics 365, we’re making ourselves a more responsive, customer-centric organization,” says Philibert. By centralizing its financial reporting and improving operational efficiencies, The Heico Companies can also onboard new acquisitions to the group faster, offering more products to its customers and securing new market share.

Extensible transformation

With much of its technology stack already based on Microsoft, The Heico Companies is taking advantage of all the Microsoft services available to it. For example, employees across the enterprise use Microsoft Teams and Microsoft SharePoint to support remote working and collaboration, which is vital for effectively managing projects across a diverse global portfolio.

“The PMO team is 12 people strong, but because we’re based in different countries, we’ve never actually all met face to face,” says Ian Dennis, Director for the Program Management Office’s Europe, Middle East and Africa operations at The Heico Companies. “Using Teams, we all feel like we really know each other, and we’re a cohesive, effective unit.”

Some Heico technology-led companies are experimenting with Microsoft Power Platform to build their own apps and services. And in several areas, they’re using Power Apps to automate processes rather than creating custom coding, which reduces the complexity and cost of implementations. Many are also adopting Power BI, digging further into their data to identify opportunities for streamlining, cost-savings and other efficiencies. This is a precursor to The Heico Companies’ next planned transformation program, where it will implement Azure Synapse Analytics and Azure Data Lake Storage to add even more capabilities to its business intelligence initiatives.

In the meantime, The Heico Companies’s Dynamics 365 implementation is continuing across its portfolio, with deployments ramping up. “The next year in our strategy and execution will be very busy,” says Narula. “We’ve got several go-lives for Dynamics 365 scheduled for every quarter. We’ve laid the foundations and now it’s time for a real transformational push.”