Ai Group had relied on a fit-for-purpose, highly customised version of Microsoft Navision 2013 (NAV) and Dynamics 365 CRM.  In 2019, Microsoft announced support was being wound-up for NAV 2013 prompting Ai Group to re-consider changes in their internal processes along with upgrading their ERP system. EBS were brought in to implement the upgrade to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central along with Continia Document Management.

Given the organisation’s size and multi-company entities, the planning involved before embarking on the project was key.

Ai Group had conducted a lot of work in discovery and had many discussions with stakeholders that needed to be involved to get the project up and through Ai Group’s governance process. Financial Controller, Mr. Daryl Lynch said, “EBS were pretty amazing with the process. There was a lot discussion about the project plan and whether the timelines were achievable.”

“The complexity of our system is the range of locations and that we had come from a multi-entity NAV system with a consolidation company, and that was time consuming. End-of-month would cost us half a day to do a consolidation process – which was a nightmare. We had a requirement in Business Central to have one operational database and have one of the key dimensions as a legal entity,” said Mr. Lynch.

There were many moving parts to the implementation and involved different vendors. Ai Group choose to upgrade to Dynamics 365 Business Central and Customer Engagement at the same time. Despite best intentions, the implementation crossed over into the new financial year.  Mr. Lynch recalled, “In the third week of July, we were finalising the implementation and activity running out of Business Central (BC) into the system that we’d moved across successfully, and we had the auditors all around us in the Melbourne office.  It was a relatively new accounting team in Melbourne (the previous team operated out of Sydney). There were processes that were new, we had people that didn’t know NAV, didn’t know the in-and-outs of the organisation that were learning Business Central, that were trying to deal with the end of year. All in all, it was a bloody amazing effort. There’s a lot of hard work by a lot of people and a lot of late nights.”

Not only did Ai Group put in a new system, they also changed the entire structure of reporting and the account numbering systems as part of their planned growth for the future. “We wanted everything to be right. So, we took the opportunity to simplify and if you look deeply and understand what is behind the changes which we simplified, we’ve made it more organised and structured,” said Mr. Lynch.

Before using Business Central, Ai Group were spending up to five hours a month to complete month-end tasks and all the users needed to be out of the system for it to be completed.  Now using Business Central they have one company with one database system with all the legal entities in real time operations which allows them to do a lot more in the system.

Mr. Lynch said, “We get to a point during the end of month process where all the accounts payable (AP) is in the system and we can check that, post the invoices and then shut AP entry for that month. Then AP just continues working forward, but the accountants can enter their accruals, do their reviews and finalise the appropriate pieces of work. We’ve changed subtly some of the structures the way we do our fixed assets reporting.  We’ve got a whole process that just rolls up.”