Challenge
The orders grew faster than the systems recording them
AmTab makes tables, and its demand through the pandemic grew faster than the estate behind it. Each order still moved on paper, with spreadsheets either side of it and nothing automated in between.
That's the ordinary trigger for an ERP. What gives way first in a manufacturer growing quickly is rarely the product.
Four things needed to change:
- No ERP holding the orders
- An architecture that predated this volume
- Departments passing work to each other by hand
- Order turnaround, which became the number every later decision was measured against
Strategy
One system of record, picked for what it connects to
Business Central became the system of record. It was chosen for how cleanly it joins to what sits either side of it, a store on one side and a CRM on the other, which matters more on a project like this than any feature comparison. An ERP that's difficult to integrate is a second silo with a licence attached.
The rest of the estate moved to Microsoft at the same time, including the productivity suite. Single sign-on across everything sounds like a small win until you count the minutes it returns to each person each day.
Digital transformation on this scale runs 12 to 24 months, and the first phase isn't technical. Processes built around manual steps have to be ready to be automated before anything automates them.
Solution
The store
amtab.com runs on nopCommerce. Buyers configure what they're ordering on the page, choosing colours, seating options and the other design choices that make one table different from the next. nopCommerce carried that configurability without a bespoke build behind it, and it runs in the cloud.
The order path
Data moves from the store to the CRM to the ERP, and back, through Power Automate flows sitting just under the application layer. A customer action on the site can trigger the next step, an email or a promo code, with the record itself arriving wherever the following process expects to find it.
Dynamics 365 holds the customer side: project registrations, discounts, and the sales and marketing history. Having it in one place is what makes a question like "which businesses in this state have bought from us before" answerable in the moment a salesperson needs it rather than after someone goes looking.
Quote to invoice
The sales team works in Business Central. Codes get updated there, prices adjusted there, and a quote becomes an order there the moment a customer approves it, with the invoice following from the same record. Nothing is re-keyed on the way through, which is the whole point of the path above.
Results
Three databases that agree
Business Central synchronises three separate databases continuously. Images and documents are served straight to the browser from Azure blob storage, which suited this estate for how easily it moves between storage options later.
Power BI sits on top of the result. The value of it here isn't the dashboard, it's that a decision about pricing or inventory can be argued from a record everyone can see rather than from whoever remembers the most.
The order path is the thing to look at, though. An order placed on amtab.com reaches the ERP that will invoice it without a person retyping it on the way, and that single fact is what reducing order turnaround actually meant.