Case Study

Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations Implementation Services Help a Leading Cable Company Streamline Business Processes and Improve Bottom Line

Customer: A company specializing in cable for wind farms and electric utilities Profile: The client offers a complete line for Collection System Underground Cables in 15KV- 35 KV TR-XLPE or EPR, Overhead
Bare Aluminum Transmission and Distribution conductors (ACSR, AAAC, and AAC), industrial power cables, Bare Copper Conductor,
Copperclad steel, Static Wire, Alumoclad, Substation Control Cables, and Communications conductor.Services: Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations Implementation
Size: 11-50 employees
Region: Miami, FL
Industry: Oil and Energy

Business Need

The cable company is an established and recognized industry leader, having served electric utilities (and now even wind farms) for over 50 years. The client was using a legacy enterprise system for sales order management, purchase order management, and financial management. However, this system was heavily customized over the course and time, and resulted in several challenges and limitations for the client’s cablespecific business:

  • Lack of visibility into the various costs that were laid on imported material made it impossible for the client to arrive at a comprehensive landed cost.
  • Managing customer sales reps and distributors who sold cables on behalf of the company and calculating accurate warehouse and sales commission was challenging.
  • Demand forecasting was done manually using excel spread sheets and custom formulas and required a single resource to collate reports from different systems to forecast data and manage the supply chain.

The client wanted to migrate to a modern ERP that could help them overcome these challenges. It partnered with Synoptek for the implementation project.

Solution and Approach

Given the challenges the client was facing, Synoptek suggested implementing Dynamics 365 as a modern ERP solution for the cable company. However, since out-of-the-box Dynamics 365 solution does not provide cable-industry specific capabilities, Synoptek partnered with InnoVites, an ISV that builds ERP solutions specifically for cable manufacturers and distributors.

Synoptek integrated InnoVites’ Cable ERP solution on top of Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations and provided the following services to the cable company:

  • Migrated critical business data from legacy COBOL and MySQL to Azure SQL
  • Built custom entities in Dynamics 365 and mapped fields with data migrated from historical database and Azure database.
  • Leveraged Dynamics 365’s built-in machine learning capabilities to build algorithms for accurate and automated demand forecasting.
  • Enabled drum/length management functionality to enable client to meet end customers’ specific cable length requirement.
  • Implemented several other Dynamics 365 modules including
    • Vendor RFQ
    • Sales Quotations
    • Sales Order Management
    • Purchase Order Management
    • Accounting.

In addition, instead of customizing legacy reports, Synoptek also built a handful of Power BI reports by taking historical data from Azure SQL and Dynamics 365.

Benefits

With Synoptek’s assistance and guidance, the cable company is able to achieve a number of business benefits including:

  • More accurate demand forecasting and planning
  • Increased visibility into financial operations
  • Better sales order and purchase order management
  • Improved cost accounting
  • Better project management and tracking
  • Enhanced drum and length management
  • Improved reporting capabilities

 

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