FieldPiece replaced Intuitive™ with Dynamics 365 Business Central | Microsoft Case Study

Hi I’m Tim Way. I’m the Chief Financial Officer here at Fieldpiece Instruments. Fieldpiece is a family-owned company, been around for about 30 plus years. We sell instruments for technicians that service your air conditioners and furnaces as well as refrigeration in both residential and commercial activities.

So when Fieldpiece came to us, they did not have any CRM system. Their sales people were relying on spreadsheets right passing those around and the management of them was difficult.

The company was operating on an on-premises server for both file storage as well as kind of a Legacy ERP system known as Intuitive.

Additionally they were managing their finances in one system. Again operational information was being tracked in spreadsheets as well.

So a little bit disparate and integrated at that point, so we needed to take some time to look to scale that going forward. During our selection process as I mentioned we were focused on a product that met our needs and we wanted something that would integrate with the Microsoft Office 365 platform and the Power BI functionality. Competing possibilities like a Netsuite or Sales Force which I’ve used the Sales Force in the past and I knew it wasn’t going to meet our needs in this case.

The Covid issues with sending people home to work remotely really pointed out – I sort of knew this because I’m a big believer in cloud-based systems from prior experience so prior to looking at our accounting system we had actually migrated everything to Office 365. As long as the Microsoft had the solution that provided all of our needs that was going to be our direct choice.

Early on in the project we discovered that we would need the different Microsoft components the ERP, CRM, Power platform. We knew we’d have to take advantage of the Microsoft AppSource for some solutions that were already available. In addition we built our own app extensions for the project in order to meet the client requirements. So when Fieldpiece came to us requiring a multi-company system international transactions inter-company transactions and of course multi-currency – that was something that we were able to work through with them implement the proper setups and give them a full solution in that area.

Abother challenge that we faced at Fieldpiece was the need to have an integrated shipping solution. What we provided them was a solution that was available on AppSource from Microsoft we implemented that solution with them to give them a one-stop shop for shipping right. They can get their prices for shipping that can find the lowest cost for the shipping product and produce those labels right out of the system.

The thing I really liked about the TMC process was that the completion of what we call the business process document, really gave us an opportunity to think through our needs, explain all the processes that we were performing, how a new system might impact those things, and then the TMC side really dug in, used that to understand our business and our business needs going forward.

Project with Fieldpiece was a success. We were able to deliver on time and on budget. The reason we were able to do this is because we set those expectations early. We devised a project plan, we outline the timelines right and were prepared for any setbacks or challenges that we have along the way.

We’re very happy with the Microsoft solution as well as the fact that TMC has been there with us every step of the way and has helped us implement new features and products and pointed out new things that we can do to enhance our business and make ourselves more efficient as well as work towards new features as we continue our growth.