DBC AX Case Study
DBC is a company on the move, and in these challenging economic times they recognised the need to have information at their fingertips in order to make quick decisions and react effectively to a volatile environment.
DBC Foodservice is a leading player in the foodservice market, operating from 12 strategic locations with multi-temperature capabilities, operating in excess of 200 vehicles and employing over 1,000 employees nationwide. DBC Foodservice offer a comprehensive multi-temperature product range, covering ambient grocery, chilled, frozen, fresh fruit & vegetables, fresh & cooked meats, non-food/ hygiene, fair trade and organic products.
DBC pride themselves on offering customers unparalleled service through operational excellence and adding genuine value through commercial dynamism. It therefore came as no surprise when DBC approched CSfD seeking to get more leverage out of their financial systems, in particular to better exploit the potential for financial management reporting.
CSfD took up a partnership with Microsoft (MS) to promote their Dynamixs AX product range in 2007. Up to this point we had provided customers with a functional nominal ledger package but recognised that the world had moved on, especially in terms of the use of IT to provide data with which to undertake informed decision making. After evaluating what the market had to offer, AX stood out as one of the top financial packages available and offered a competitive pricing structure. We were also aware that implementing a Microsoft product frequently lessens the upheaval to the existing infrastructure of a company, given the prevalence of Microsoft products in the modern business environment and MS skills that often reside in house already.
DBC agreed that the AX General Ledger (GL) module lent itself to their requirements and provided them with a pathway forward. This is not only in terms of regular releases of the software but also in terms of extending the system in the future to include other modules such as asset management, payroll and human resource management.
With their original nominal ledger, information had to be extracted from the system and rekeyed into a series of spreadsheets. In contrast, AX incorporates all of their management reporting requirements as standard and provides benefits in terms of efficiency as well as functionality.
After identifying the overall project scope, it was necessary to identify the precise detail of what was needed and how to achieve that in the most efficient way possible. The first step in the process was to identify the information that needed to be extracted from the existing nominal ledger to the AX GL, including historical data. The next step was to decide on what functions performed on a daily basis within the KDS Sales and Purchase Ledgers needed to be posted to AX. Although there had previously been a direct link from the original nominal ledger to the KDS Purchase Ledger, no such link had been available from the Sales Ledger causing journals to be posted into the nominal manually. A further step was to identify how to transfer the chart of accounts in the most efficient way.
Once these basic requirements had been established and documented in a series of functional specifications, the project was reviewed to take into account any anomolies that needed to be catered for. The main concern was that the previous system, and hence the DBC business process, was geared around the concept of accounting periods whereas AX is a date driven system. Because AX is so much more than a simple ledger system, it is designed to be driven by reporting and analysis needs. KDS has been purposefully designed to be very flexible and easy to change and is able to interface to any number of third party products. Equally, AX easily accomodates developments done outside of it. In this instance a means of maintaining period end dates for periods was developed within KDS and sent across to the AX system. This meant that AX could be set up using existing parameters, saving time and money and making it easier to maintain.
On site training was provided for the customer to help them learn how to use the powerful AX reporting and analysis tools and ongoing support was made available to the customer for a period afterwards.
The end result is a dynamic and imaginative solution to modern business needs. DBC are benefitting from the robustness of a functionally rich and powerful ERP system for their support functions combined with the agility brought to them by the more flexible and agile KDS system to cater for their core business operation.
