Dynamics 365
Dynamics 365 Finance
Financial management, cost accounting and close automation across entities and currencies.
Manufacturing · Business Applications
Month-end close cut by a quarter across sixteen plants
An international packaging materials producer, Europe and Asia. Fragmented legacy systems, manual operations and limited visibility across global supply chain and finance processes were slowing delivery and obscuring inventory and cost.
The situation
What the organization was dealing with
Fragmented legacy systems, manual operations and limited visibility across global supply chain and finance processes were slowing delivery and obscuring inventory and cost.
Multi-plant manufacturers accumulate local process variation for good reasons — different equipment, different customers, different regulators — and then discover that the variation prevents any group-level view.
What was done
The work, and the part that was actually hard
Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management were implemented to unify operations, automate manual tasks and provide real-time insight across sixteen manufacturing plants.
A 25% reduction in month-end close is the kind of figure that indicates real standardisation rather than a reporting improvement. Close time falls when the underlying transactions are consistent across sites, which is a process outcome that happens to show up in the finance calendar.
Results
What was published
These are the figures exactly as reported in the source. Nothing has been rounded, extrapolated or restated.
Reduction in month-end close time25%
Plants standardised16
Inventory and cost visibilityReal-time
What changed
- Processes standardised across plants in eight countries
- Month-end close time reduced by a quarter
- Inventory and cost visibility improved across every site
- Delivery speed improved through automation of manual steps
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
Close cycle time is a good single proxy for how standardised a multi-site manufacturer actually is.
Where it usually gets harder than expected: Standardisation across sixteen plants in eight countries means statutory localisation in eight jurisdictions. That work is unglamorous and is usually what determines the timeline.
How we would take it on
Our approach to Business Applications work
1
Shadow the real process
We sit with the people doing the work and watch what actually happens, including every workaround. Process documents and reality are rarely the same thing.
2
Design against your own data
We prototype and show you your own records in it, not a demo company, before anything is built.
3
Go live in a contained phase
By site, by practice group or by service line — with the group that wants it most going first, to a fixed price.
4
Measure against the baseline
We report against the numbers agreed at the start, including where the result fell short of the target.
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.
Talk to our teamMore Business Applications storiesWe reply to every message within one business day.
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