Project snapshot
To improve the quality of financial data processing, Intellias assisted a medical retail company in migrating their financial flows to Microsoft Dynamics 365, customizing and configuring Dynamics 365 applications to suit the client’s needs. In the course of this project, we helped the client unlock the full scope of Microsoft Dynamics 365 capabilities and adapt Dynamics 365 functionality to their business requirements.
From discovery and analysis to detailed reconfiguration and customization, we reviewed and revised the client’s financial flows, creating a unified ecosystem based on Microsoft Dynamics 365. In addition to streamlining financial management processes, we showed the client the full potential of Dynamics 365 applications, helping them maximize the benefit from their investment.
Our client is a UK-based retail business specializing in healthcare and beauty products and services. The company serves thousands of retail customers, supplying high-quality healthcare products and equipment to dental practices, beauty salons, and beauty clinics across the country.
Business challenge
The client reached out to Intellias for assistance in improving the quality and efficiency of their financial operations. After analyzing the business’s existing infrastructure, our consultants discovered that the client’s finances were managed in a collection of custom applications created to administer individual financial processes:
- Procure-to-Pay for management and accounting of payments for goods and services necessary for the retail business
- Order-to-Cash for handling customer orders and related operations: credit management, invoicing, shipping, payment collection, and reporting
- Record-to-Report for gathering, processing, and organizing financial data for presentation
In addition to these custom applications, the client was already using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance in its basic configuration only to manage their general ledger. But due to such limited use, the company could not fully appreciate the broader application and benefits of Dynamics 365 solutions.
While performing its main function of managing financial operations, the infrastructure (consisting of several dedicated applications) had a number of issues that impacted its performance and slowed business growth:
- Inefficient integration resulted in substandard data quality, accuracy, and availability
- Low flexibility affected the system’s scalability and responsiveness
- Maintenance was difficult and costly
As a result, the company’s financial processes could not guarantee the data integrity and clarity necessary to provide the required level of service. Often, data was missing, incomplete, or unavailable when needed.
Solution
To address the issues discovered during the initial analysis and help the retail business streamline its financial processes, our team identified the software components that needed to be migrated, reconfigured, or customized in order to improve their performance. Prioritizing areas that required immediate attention, we designed the implementation of the following Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance modules to resolve the most critical pain points:
- Sales and purchase ledgers
- Enhancements to the general ledger
- Cash and bank management
- Fixed assets
Based on fit gap analysis of the ability of out-of-the-box Dynamics 365 features and functionalities to meet business requirements in each of the critical areas, our functional consultants configured Dynamics 365 to enable the functionality needed to provide the expected level of performance. For requirements that could not be met through configuration, our developers customized the application to tailor its functionality.
We summarized our findings and solution design in detailed documentation that we presented to the client:
- Functional design document containing solution specifications and expected capabilities
- Solution design document describing business requirements, goals, and objectives along with the features necessary to achieve them
Within nine months, the company’s financial operations had been successfully migrated to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance. Our experts verified the implementation and tested its performance. The post-launch phase also included training for the client’s personnel and exclusive support to ensure that Dynamics 365 Finance was working as expected.
Business outcomes
Migrating all financial processes to the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform allowed us to build a unified financial data management environment, enabling a seamless data flow between modules. This improved the overall performance of financial processes, bringing tangible benefits to the client:
- Improved data quality as a result of data cleansing performed during migration
- Stronger data security through creation of a unified ecosystem protected by the built-in security mechanisms of Microsoft Dynamics 365
- 50% faster reporting thanks to smooth integration of data components
- Improved data availability by streamlining data flows across the system
- Mitigation of operational risks with more reliable financial management infrastructure
- New growth opportunities due to dynamic and flexible integration