The Business
Since 1999, this provider of retail financial services into the UK market has grown their business with Microsoft Dynamics at the heart of financial administration.
Based in the City of London, with offices around the UK and development teams in Australia, this Stock Exchange Listed business has grown and now has over £43 Billion of investor funds under management.
The Challenges
As the organisation had grown, the need to better manage financial transactions, together with the need for better reporting and business intelligence, resulted in a decision to deploy a robust and functionally rich Finance solution. The following prerequisites when assessing potential solutions were essential:
- The solution should have excellent ‘drill down and across’ capabilities to enable users to quickly and easily assimilate information from across the entire solution.
- The solution should have comprehensive reporting and Business Intelligence capabilities within the core application.
- The ability to link with Microsoft Excel for the import of both sales and purchase ledger transactions.
- The facility to operate multiple legal entities, and consolidate data, within one database.
Following a review of leading Finance software providers, Microsoft Dynamics was selected due to its proven functionality and capabilities to meet their key objectives.
Picking Advantage
After making the decision to migrate to a Microsoft Dynamics solution to align with a strategy for Microsoft technologies, the organisation adopted a search and selection process with potential partners that were able to meet key criteria:
- A partner with a proven track record in similar organisations, ideally based within Central London.
- Ability to provide development capability to integrate their externally produced sales and purchase ledger transactions with the finance application.
- Provide proactive Account Management to drive the organisation forwards and act as an advocate for Microsoft technologies.
- Provision of a proactive support desk, with inherent accountancy skills as well as deep functional knowledge and experience of Microsoft Dynamics.
Following a review of leading UK Partners, Advantage was selected to implement the Microsoft Dynamics solution. Furthermore, Advantage continues to provide ongoing business continuity support to this day.
The Benefits
The Microsoft Dynamics solution was successfully implemented within a short timeframe. Some of the benefits realised by the Microsoft solution and move to Advantage were:
- Improved reporting and Business Intelligence capability was inherent within the solution, to enable the organisation to quickly export and analyse data at a glance.
- Provided organisational efficiency – it is critical that time delays for the day to day running of the business were minimised to focus on business-critical tasks.
- Provided a seamless mechanism to import sales and purchase transactions from their inhouse application into the finance solution, saving time, eliminating manual entry and potential data entry errors.
- Implementation of a solution that enabled the organisation to expand without additional demand placed upon the finance team overheads.
The value gained from the finance solution was highlighted by the Head of Finance at this professional services company who stated “With our company growing at a rapid rate it was crucial that we implemented a finance system that could help us to better manage our financial transactions. At this point, we decided to bring in Advantage to help fully implement this Microsoft Dynamics finance system into our business. We have to say that from the start, Advantage were extremely knowledgeable and efficient in the way they handled such a complicated implementation to make sure that the system did exactly what we wanted it to do. As well at this, we’re pleased with the communications that we received throughout the project regarding the progress and any problems that had been encountered and what they planned to do to resolve them. If you are looking for a Microsoft partner to help implement a Microsoft Dynamics finance system for your business that I would suggest that you choose Advantage, you won’t regret it!”.
Martyn Kemp, New Business Sales & Account Manager at Advantage remarked “I was extremely pleased with how quickly the Microsoft Dynamics ERP project was delivered from start to finish and the almost immediate positive impact of the new system on their business. Furthermore, we continue to support this reliable technology through our team of Dynamics experts based at Advantage to ensure that they are maximising their use of the solution as their business continues to grow”.
Conclusion
As mentioned above, this professional services company is delighted with their decision to implement a Microsoft Dynamics finance system with Advantage.
Following the successful implementation of their new Microsoft Dynamics finance system, they have significantly transformed the way that they manage financial transactions, improved the way they operate multiple legal entities and consolidate data in one database as well as taking advantage of the comprehensive reporting and business intelligence capabilities at their disposal. To this day, Advantage continue to provide full support for this solution to ensure that they continue to use all of the functionality that is available within the system.
