Standardisation, simplification, and cost savings with Dynamics 365

Altron combines technical expertise with in-depth customer understanding to provide end-to-end holistic technology solutions. Founded in 1965, Altron has a direct presence in South Africa, rest of Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Australia. In addition, its strategic partnerships with leading international technology companies provide access to leading technology capabilities and products from across the world, including Asia, Europe and North America.

Altron’s purpose is to deliver innovation that matters. The group’s operations are broken into four defined segments – managed services, infrastructure, systems integration and platforms.

Problem

Altron Group embarked on an initiative to consolidate certain operational processes and systems into a Shared Services structure. Altron Group comprised several operating companies, each with their own ERP application and practices. Every system, such as Oracle and Microsoft AX, required a different vendor to support it and some of these applications were outside of their support and software assurance agreements. Managing all these disparate ERPs proved to be cost prohibitive.

To address this, as well as reduce complexity, a decision was taken to standardise them and the core processes across the group. Also, since each operating company had certain unique functional and reporting requirements, the organisation needed to implement a solution with a platform that enabled standardisation, whilst also catering for these distinct needs.

Solution

Altron Group assessed the market and selected Microsoft Dynamics 365 as their preferred technology platform – Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement for their CRM requirements in addition to Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations on the ERP side. The comprehensive solution leveraged a vast array of other Microsoft products to complement it, including Azure Logic Apps for integration and Power BI and Atlas for dashboards and reporting.

It was implemented in a phased approach, with selected operating companies and countries going live over a three-year period. The project adhered to key architectural principles, to ensure the solution aligned to Microsoft’s overall roadmap. Customisations were kept to a minimum and only deployed where necessary, with approval by a Change Advisory Board. Business processes were brought in line with the solution, to encourage standardisation.

“Our adoption of the Microsoft ERP stack has delivered on our core objectives of reduction of cost (15%), simplification and standardisation of core processes and being able to onboard and offboard companies based on the agile and acquisitive approach we have as Altron.”

 

Collin Govender – Chief Information Officer

Outcome

The chosen solution has enabled Altron Group to reduce its overall ERP expenditure right across the organisation by 20%. By consolidating their licenses with a single Vendor, Altron Group benefited from a preferential investment model, plus a lot more focused and therefore, improved support. They have re-organised their shared services staff, offering more effective allocation of resources.  Data is managed in a more secure environment and there is less reliance on manual processes, like extracting data into Excel and executing tasks.

With Internal IT Support being responsible for fewer ERP systems, they have been able to deepen their support skills on the Microsoft products.  Plus, the alignment to a standard solution has meant they can easily stay on the Microsoft Product Roadmap. The cloud platform allows Altron Group to upgrade within Microsoft’s recommended timeframe and to derive value from continuous improvements and additional features.

Speak to one of our experts to find out how Dynamics 365 can provide standardisation, simplification and cost savings for your company.