CASE STUDY
Elecro Engineering
Sage 50 Accounts, Manufacturing and CRM Migration to Dynamics 365 Business Central
Who are Elecro Engineering
Elecro Engineering Limited are the British manufacturer of high quality heating equipment for swimming pools, aquatic and tropical marine applications, water sanitisers and customised solutions.
Our products have been proudly manufactured in Hertfordshire, England for over 17 years and are renowned throughout the world for their quality and reliability. Elecro products are the choice of Industry professionals worldwide.
The challenge
Elecro were using Sage Accounts, Sage Manufacturing and Salesforce to accommodate their accounting, manufacturing and contact management needs. Whilst the Sage applications offered some level of integration the lack of a unified system to provide end to end processes from initial contact, through quoting, ordering and despatching was reducing productivity. Part numbers had to be manually cross checked and the lack of an integrated solution necessitated duplicate data entry.
Due to the international nature of their business, Elecro needed multiple language capabilities and the lack of integrated serial number printing resulted in a labour-intensive process! In short – the lack of access to consistent business information from one source rather than multiple separate systems, was becoming increasingly inefficient and provided insufficient data mining and reporting – required to support the continued growth of the business.
Their business challenges were further heightened by the immediate need to upgrade their server and client machines in addition to needing to increase system user numbers on their current applications due to an expanding workforce.
The solutionSage 50 Accounts, Manufacturing and CRM Migration to Dynamics 365 Business Central
After a full consultation with the Elecro team qualifying that enhancing their existing systems would not return the improvement the business needed, and system migration would return the best investment overall, the Qi and Elecro teams partnered to implement a cloud-based Dynamics 365 Business Central project.
The immediate need for an on-site server was removed enabling Elecro to host a single, unified system on Azure supported by a network of replacement PC’s with a robust security protocol to include Unified Threat Management. Their specific label printing requirements are satisfied within Business Central and the need to manually cross check part numbers originating from outside of the EU has been replaced with an automatic capability.
Now utilising Dynamics Business Central CRM in place of Salesforce, Elecro now has the end to end visibility they require of the entire sales process which in turn supports the time management of the sales team. Qi also continue to support the Elecro team maximising their use of Office 365 with a SharePoint optimisation being completed as part of the wider business review.
The outcome
90% Time Saving on Serial Number Recording
We asked Rick Burlingham one of the leads in implementing the project at Elecro to give us his views first hand. This is what he shared with us:
Serial number scanning
We used to have someone physically writing down every serial number for each order (could be hundreds each time), then having someone type them into the serial number database etc once they were done. Now we just scan them with the barcode scanner and it all gets automatically recorded to the relevant order in Business Central. It literally is saving us hours of time and ensures the integrity of our serial number recording.
Label printing
We’ve reduced the time it takes to print barcode labels by combining it with Business Central. The serial numbers are automatically generated in Business Central, then printed on our normal office printer. This has also reduced the amount of hardware we need as we’ve managed to lose the old PC and thermal printer.
We asked the accounts team at Elecro to share with us their experience of using Dynamics 365 Business Central NAV after migrating from Sage 50 accounts and the following is the ‘edited highlights’ from Karen Harrison who heads up the accounts team.
Dynamics 365 Business Central is a lot easier and clearer to use than Sage 50. All our information is one place and it makes our lives so much easier!
Accounting reports are easy to run and manipulate. The limitations of standard reporting in Sage often meant that we couldn’t provide our Senior Management Team with the information they needed in the format they needed without a lot of extra work or commissioning a bespoke report.
Dynamics 365 Business Central makes it easy to export date to Excel to analyse data. Exporting data to Excel from Sage 50 was often temperamental and time consuming. Being able to export to Excel so easily enables us to analyse a lot more data than we could before, right across the business providing a real time view of our operation.
Elecro are now reaping the rewards of using a single database SQL solution to meet the needs of the business across all their departments day to day. Dynamics Business Central enables the Elecro management team to access comprehensive management reporting and provides a user-friendly solution for the proactive body of staff that support Elecro in its continuing success.
Dynamics 365 Business Central is a lot easier and clearer to use than Sage 50 Manufacturing and Accounts. All our information is one place and it makes our lives so much easier! Accounting reports are easy to run and manipulate. The limitations of standard reporting in Sage often meant that we couldn’t provide our Senior Management Team with the information they needed in the format they needed without a lot of extra work or commissioning a bespoke report.