Dynamics 365
Dynamics 365 Finance
Financial management, cost accounting and close automation across entities and currencies.
Manufacturing · Strategy & Transformation
A heavily customised ERP retired across twenty-four plants
A global electronic components manufacturer, Global. The existing ERP was highly customised and expensive to maintain, and could not support material requirements planning across a business with power assets of 500 components and 65,000 SKUs.
The situation
What the organization was dealing with
The existing ERP was highly customised and expensive to maintain, and could not support material requirements planning across a business with power assets of 500 components and 65,000 SKUs.
A heavily customised ERP is a specific kind of trap. Each customisation was justified when it was made, and collectively they make upgrade impossible and maintenance expensive — so the system ages in place while the cost of leaving it grows.
What was done
The work, and the part that was actually hard
Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management were deployed across twenty-four manufacturing locations, giving the company a single system and global reporting for the first time.
Sixty-five thousand SKUs and assemblies of five hundred components is the detail that explains the requirement. At that complexity, material requirements planning is not a feature checkbox; it is the reason the system exists, and it has to work in both directions across inbound supply and outbound demand.
Results
What was published
These are the figures exactly as reported in the source. Nothing has been rounded, extrapolated or restated.
Manufacturing locations24
SKUs managed65,000
System, for the first time1
What changed
- A single system replacing a costly, heavily customised estate
- Global reporting possible for the first time
- MRP running in both directions across inbound and outbound forecasting
- Adoption across customer service, quality, manufacturing, finance and engineering
Platforms involved
What each product was doing here
Dynamics 365
Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management
Planning, inventory, warehouse and production execution, with availability that reflects what is physically there.
What transfers
If you were to attempt this
Global reporting being possible 'for the first time' is a common outcome of consolidation and rarely the stated objective. It is usually worth more than the efficiency case that funded the project.
Where it usually gets harder than expected: Replacing a customised ERP tempts an organization into re-creating the customisations. The discipline is deciding which were solving a real constraint and which were solving a preference.
How we would take it on
Our approach to Strategy & Transformation work
1
Establish the real baseline
We measure what the current estate actually costs to run and what it prevents, before anyone proposes a target state.
2
Agree the outcomes in writing
The measures, the definitions and the method — settled with the executive team before design begins rather than argued about at the end.
3
Sequence by payback
Phase one is scoped to prove itself before phase two is commissioned. Long programmes that produce nothing for a year lose their sponsor before they finish.
4
Keep the option to stop
Each phase ends at a decision point with the evidence to make it. Continuing to protect a decision already made is an expensive habit.
Recognise the problem?
If any of the above describes your organization, tell us where it hurts most. We will tell you what the same platforms could realistically do in your environment, what we would measure, and whether we think it is worth doing at all.
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