CASE STUDY
ATL Agricultural Technology Ltd
ATL migrates from Sage 50 Manufacturing to Dynamics 365 Business Central
Who are ATL Agricultural Technology Ltd
ATL has been developing and manufacturing smart, electronic milking parlour solutions for 40 years. Their range includes milking parlours for cows, goats and sheep in addition to cluster removers,milk meters, in and out-of- parlour feeders. Parlour automation is further enhanced via their automatic identification, plant washing and drafting solutions.
The challenge
ATL had invested in Sage Manufacturing in 2005 to work alongside their Sage 50 Accounts Professional but by 2021 were frustrated by the lack of technical updates for Manufacturing (which has subsequently been discontinued). Due to ATL’s hard work and resulting business growth their software needs had changed. ATL were experiencing issues getting the right information out of their Sage systems for reporting purposes, quickly and reliably. The business required a system that would support staged payments from their customers across multiple currencies and the production team required improved serial number recording and traceability.
With sales offices based in different countries, which required their own price lists for quoting purposes, it was becoming increasingly hard and time consuming to get quotes out and to capture information regarding the overall sales pipeline. Any new system would need to have CRM so that ATL could complete sales and marketing data capture and proactive customer communication moving forward.
The impact of Brexit had made it crucial that materials requirements could be forward planned and ordered and of course anything to do with paperwork had become three times as complicated! ATL needed a system that could support not only their current processes but legislative requirements for their supply chain. It was time to move to enterprise resource planning!
The solutionATL migrates from Sage 50 Manufacturing to Dynamics 365 Business Central
Migration from Sage 50 Accounts, Sage 50 Manufacturing + Libre Office to Dynamics 365 Business Central Premium + Microsoft 365
Microsoft 365
The first step was to migrate ATL from its current email and web document solutions to Microsoft 365 licensing. Not only would this support the email logging function within Business Central’s CRM area, it would provide full access to Office 365 applications, Teams and SharePoint. Business Central and Microsoft 365 have an increasingly symbiotic relationship, (which will strengthen still further in the Wave 1 April 2022 release of Business Central), and the business owners recognised this and appreciated this step as a foundation to a successful project,
Business Central Project
All ATL’s Sage 50 Accounts and Manufacturing data was successfully migrated into Business Central, and it was this test data which was used for training.
Training was delivered with a mix of remote and onsite services, backed up with video recordings and workshops to ensure ATL’s staff were confident in their new system prior to the final data migration at the point of going live on their new system.
ATL’s newly recruited Sales Manager set to work ensuring that the CRM function within Business Central would be used to support efficient quoting practices and capturing of opportunities to build a meaningful pipeline for forecasting purposes.
The outcome
Multiple Price Lists within Business Central halves the time to raise quotes!
The multiple price list function enables ATL to specify price lists for different markets with appropriate discounts and ancillary charges built in. The quote creation process is faster and reliably accurate.
Quotes can now be raised accurately and easily and the time between quote request and customer quote receipt has reduced dramatically.
‘I use the Business Central phone app to raise quotes from my mobile when I am out of the office. Being able to look up the varying price lists and raise and send the quote quickly and accurately to the customer, has been the biggest game changer for me, personally. The accounts team has found the transition from Sage 50 accounts smoother than expected and find the improved foreign currency functionality, really useful. The production team now have full serial number recording and traceability in a central system rather than having to use complex Excel spreadsheets. We have known Qi for many years and they didn't disappoint! The training and go live support was excellent and Qi is a great business partner for this solution.'