Fast growth: It’s what every business strives for—especially those just starting out. An increasing number of orders coming in the door means more revenue. But it doesn’t always add up to greater profits, and there’s likely a lot of headaches for the staff as the business goes through growing pains.
It’s challenging to manage finances and operations as the business processes a rapidly-expanding number of transactions. This is particularly true in cases where separate applications are in use to manage different functions—such as proposals, work orders, quality control and invoicing. This approach requires a lot of manual work to execute workflows and to rekey data into the various systems as customer requests turn into delivered goods and services.
And when a business reaches the point where it has multiple facilities, each running with its own chart of accounts, it can be difficult for managers to consolidate general ledgers and get a good grasp of the KPIs across the company. Manipulating spreadsheets to get the required information takes a lot of patience and expertise.
Overcoming the Obstacles
But overcoming the obstacles is possible, as demonstrated by Iotron Industries. The provider of electron-beam processing services and equipment, with facilities in in Canada and the U.S., has been in operations for more than 20 years. The company recently took on the challenge of fast growth by collaborating with Western Computer to deploy the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations ERP platform.
The solution appealed to Iotron for the many built-in functions that come standard. Those that are particularly helpful for Iotron’s business model include quality management, travel & expense tracking, workflow automation, and KPI reporting.
The new ERP platform is one component of Iotron’s overall five-year IT infrastructure plan to move all of its applications to the cloud. Iotron wants to leverage the cloud so all three of its locations can easily share data. Executives and sales personnel using mobile devices can also access data while on the road.
The Benefits of Consolidating Finance and Operations
With all finance and operations functions in one platform, Iotron reduced the customization that’s normally required to configure an ERP solution, and thus reduced the overall cost of the implementation.
Iotron also eliminated the cost to integrate third-party solutions.
Another key benefit from Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations is the ability for Iotron to go paperless when handling customer orders and managing quality control. The company can now digitize documents, which not only speeds up workflows and helps automate quality control, but also eliminates manual input errors.
Iotron is also streamlining information flows across the organization, making it a lot easier for managers to produce KPI reports. A key factor in this capability is that Microsoft Power BI is embedded right into the ERP platform. Analyzing financials, sales activity, customer lists, work orders, and product lists takes a lot less time than it did when using spreadsheets.
When discussing the success of the ERP project, Jason Cornell, the Business Improvement Director for Iotron, emphasizes the key role played by Western Computer: “With fast-moving technology like Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, it’s good to have a partner like Western Computer alongside to help us through the bumps that inevitably come upon any technology deployment,” Cornell says. “This was my first ERP implementation, and it went fairly smoothly. When questions came up, Western Computer was always there to handle them. We could not have succeeded without their help.”
To find out more about how Western Computer helped Iotron deploy a new ERP platform and adjust internal workflows to accommodate the company’s fast growth, download the full customer success story. We would also be glad to schedule a call to discuss how we can help your company achieve similar benefits. Contact us today to get started.
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