Dynamics Business Central

Interfood Technology is a multi-million pound distribution and service company operating in the food manufacturing industry. Since 2004, they had been using Dynamics Nav as their primary ERP system. This system had been upgraded to Dynamics 2009 R2 by 2015 when I joined the company full-time.

The system had long since become a common complaint point among staff due to, I learned with time, the fact it had not been configured the way that people thought it worked, resulting in frequent perceived 'glitches' and workarounds being required and development upon development created by multiple support providers leading to a system that everyone was wary to touch in case it 'broke'.

I immediately set my sights on learning the system and making it better.

I achieved this through configuration changes and teaching the staff how to use it more efficiently. Above everything else, I wanted to upgrade to the latest version and give the staff a system they would enjoy using, something that was initially met with resistance by management for multiple reasons, but over time it became more and more apparent that the system needed refreshing.

After waiting for Brexit changes to become clear, the company committed to investing in a new ERP system. I was asked to join the project team as the technical lead, and after a tendering process I was successful in demonstrating that Dynamics Business Central was the best solution for the company, both in terms of its functionality, but also its ability to integrate with other technologies I had deployed and ultimately its cost was significantly cheaper than some alternative solutions.

Public Cloud, fresh start, same (clean!) data.

We had very clear success criteria set for the project:

- We would aim to stay as 'out of the box' as possible.
- We would question our processes and make them more efficient during the upgrade.
- We would place a key focus on user adoption, to ensure the staff were excited about the change instead of resistant.
- We would consolidate from three companies to one, an action we had done organisationally, but not systematically.

I ensured that I understood every aspect of both our business processes and how Business Central's underlying table structure worked. This enabled me to complete all of the data migration myself, extracting every required table from our on-premise SQL databases, consolidating the data from three companies into one, cleansing the data with the help of colleagues and then importing it into a fresh environment of Business Central version 19. After a co-ordinated halt of database operations post month-end, I was able to migrate financial balances, inventory levels, customer and vendor sales/purchase history and outstanding orders successfully and deployed the system within our planned timeframe and without major issue. Something that made the long hours worth it! Ultimately, this reduced the total cost of the project by £62,000 in 3rd-party consultancy labour.

Deployment ✅ but what about development?

While overall we stuck to 'out of the box' functionality, some of our workflow processes had required development. This started me on a path of teaching myself AL code as another endeavour to save the company money while satisfying the urge that creative problem solving through coding provides.
While I'm not yet a seasoned developer, I've created our own extension and deployed multiple changes to our Business Central tenant to bring efficiency gains that users are now actively engaging with and seeking.

A streamlined system, a motivated workforce and an IT manager who knows every corner of the system.

Since the upgrade, employees throughout all levels of the company are confident that they will receive the support they need when using arguably the most important system in their daily role. With developments becoming much more accessible for the company, staff have enjoyed being able to ask "is this possible?" and hearing me reply "Yeah, no problem!"