Implementation of Business Central For Ultimation
Executive Summary
About Client
Ultimation Industries is known for conveyor technologies and automation business for the last 30 years. They are the leading manufacturers in USA and they provide services to customers from various international markets. The products that they offer are:
- Conveyors
- Automation Equipment
- Specialty machines for tire, wheel mounting and inflation
- Online Sales of Conveyors and its parts
https://www.ultimationinc.com/
Location: Roseville, Michigan, USA
Project Background- Business Central Implementation
Ultimation Industries collaborated with Peritos Solutions for their business central implementation project. They wanted to automate and streamline their business processes which included sectors like: Sales, Purchasing, Finance, Inventory, BI and Reporting. They wanted relevant custom functionalities that made their processes easier.
Scope & Requirement
Implement Business Central module
- Core Features like Sales, Purchasing, Inventory, Finance
Implementation
Technology and Architecture
Technology
Business Central ERP was implemented with the core Modules as below
• Modules Sales, Purchasing, Inventory, Financial, Reporting and Jobs
• Database: SQL
• Programming: AL, C# APIs
Integrations
• Integration with WooCommerce Store on WordPress site
• Integration with Amazon Store
• Integration with Avalara Taxation
Security:
- Authentication via Active Directory
- Multi-Factor Authentication
- Granular Role based access
- Data is encrypted at-rest by using Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) and backup encryption.
- Data backups are always encrypted.
- All network traffic inside the service is encrypted by using industry standard encryption protocols.
Backup and Recovery
- Standard Database and application backup
- Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is small and could take up to a few seconds or a couple of minutes
- Recovery Time Objective (RTO) varies depending on the nature of the outage, and could take up to 4 to 10 hours.
Scalability
- Managed automatically by Microsoft. Business Central runs much faster with a focus on typical business scenarios and usage patterns. The experience in the browser is more responsive thanks to on-demand loading of page elements, server resources are optimized for fast user interaction, and the database has been tuned to handle more data and load it faster.
Cost Optimization
- License cost varies for a Team and Essential license from 8 USD to 70 USD per month per user. We included a mix set of these 2 licenses for around 20 team members.
Code Management, Deployment
- Code for the app is committed on Azure DevOps
- CI /CD implemented for any changes and continous deployment
features of Business Central Implementation
Sales:
- Manage sales processes and information, such as quotes, orders, returns, and customer accounts, and make drop shipments.
Purchasing:
- Manage purchasing processes and information, such as invoices, orders, returns, and vendor accounts, and purchase items from sales documents.
Finance:
- It offers control of the financial data
- Accelerates financial closing and reporting by optimizing reports for profitable financial decisions
Inventory:
- Register new inventory or service-type items, categorise items for easy searching, adjust inventory levels, and perform common inventory costing tasks.
BI & Reporting:
- Get insight to the performance of your business activities through budgets, account schedules, and analysis views. using Fiscal Year, Trial Balance and Reports Per transaction, per customer and Vendor
Challenges
- Change management for the users to adopt to the new way of working was a challenge.
- Having a Key point of contact from the team and conducting multiple user sessions spread across different team member with the key users to enable them to carry out the business processes efficiently
- Migration of open balances had a lot of data issues which were not something Business central was able to handle by standard.
- Preparing for mock go live ahead of Go Live and agreeing on the correct way to handle the data inconsistencies in the system was done.
- Customization were done wherever needed example to update posted invoices for Vendor when the actual invoice came in as the client had already accounted for those invoices in the legacy system without recieving the invoice.
- Integration with store front to ensure that 1000s of orders could come in smoothly and they should be posted automatically as it comes from either Amazon or WooCommerce which already had a processing step automated
- We created sales order as the incoming document and a batch job for posting these sales order from the system automatically. If any issues it was shown on the job log as well as the order remained stuck which could be corrected via manual intervention by the client as needed.
Project Completion
Duration
Feb 2021 – Dec 2021 Go Live ~ 10 months
Deliverables
- Fully configured Business Central environment and mapped to Ultimation Business Model with functionalities of sales, purchasing, inventory, BI and reporting.
- Signed off with user training and Admin and end user guides for the Ultimation team members
- Migrating Open balances Customer, vendor, Inventory, Bank reco, General ledger accounts, Open Sales Orders, Purchase orders, Open Invoices for customers and vendors.
- Migrating Master data which included Customers, Vendors , Metadata, Chart of accounts, Items, user information, Custom fields and data mapping.
Support
As part of the project implementation we provided 1 month of extended support. This includes any Major / Minor bug fixes.
Testimonial Business Central Implementation
Below is the feedback recieved from key stakeholder 3 months after completion of Business Central implementation project.
We are very happy with the results of this major IT project with Peritos Solutions. Their staff gained a good knowledge of our business and processes. They were able to work with many of our diverse team members and launch Business Central ERP on time and on budget according to our requirements. We will be using them again for future projects and additional development actions. Thank you!
Richard Canny
President, Ultimation industries
Next Phase Business Central Implementation
We are now looking at the next phase of the project which involves:
- Ongoing Support and maintenance for running business central core modules and assisting in day to day operations
- Implementing customizations, development changes or exploring new features in Business Central
- Answering How to Questions from different team members in Ultimation industries
