Cloud Manufacturing with Business Central
SIRS Navigation Ltd designs, manufactures and calibrates high-quality magnetic standby compasses for the global aviation industry.
The business needed to move beyond Sage 50 Accounts and Sage 50 Manufacturing, supporting its cloud strategy while improving traceability, reporting and control across complex manufacturing processes.
Qi migrated SIRS to Dynamics 365 Business Central Premium using its MigrateNow! toolkit, with full historic Sage data moved over a weekend. The result was a modern cloud ERP platform, easier access to information, stronger reporting and considerable day-to-day time savings.
The Challenge
Sirs Navigation, having used Sage 50 Accounts and Sage 50 Manufacturing for many years, needed to migrate to an alternative solution for three key reasons:
Legacy Software
Sage 50 Manufacturing had been discontinued by Sage UK, would receive no further development, and was only compatible with older versions of Sage 50 Accounts.
The Move to Cloud Computing
The overarching strategy of the business owners was to move towards a wholly cloud-based environment, with the use of Microsoft 365 SaaS and the deployment of SharePoint and Teams.
Improved Functionality
The sensitive and complex nature of the Sirs Navigation business across products, supply chain, service and quality control require detailed traceability and reporting. These activities were largely completed outside of Sage and were therefore time consuming.
The Solution
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Premium, for complex manufacturing.
Following demonstrations of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central with Qi, it was identified by the SIRS business owners that this Microsoft ERP would be a great fit for their requirements now and for the future.
Qi provisioned a 30-day trial environment to enable Sirs to gain the reassurance that the move to Business Central was the right one. Onsite and remote training, including tailored workshops, was delivered by Qi. Qi migrated Sage 50 Accounts Professional and Sage 50 Manufacturing data with full history to Business Central using their custom MigrateNow! toolkit — a process completed over a weekend, resulting in Sirs starting business on Monday, processing on Business Central.
The Outcome
Efficient processing and considerable time savings.
Maise Bylett – Commercial Director at Sirs Navigation Ltd commented:
Every day we are seeing considerable time savings with Business Central. As it’s a single database, all the information we need is easily accessed from one place and we can drill into information easily. The reporting is far superior to that of Sage 50 Accounts and Sage 50 Manufacturing and that is important for us. Business Central also has a much more intuitive interface, and it’s modern! We process a large amount of data analysis in Excel and as Business Central is a Microsoft product it is efficient at pushing data into Excel.