The European base of M-Sport, located in Krakow, is responsible for the Ford Fiesta Rally R2, R3, R4 and R5 programmes with the FIA Junior World Rally Championship also designated to the operation. From its inception it expanded rapidly with an increasing number of orders, growing customer requirements, the need to ensure the highest quality products, and integration with M-Sport's British HQ. These are just a few of the factors that made the company look for a proven IT system. Ultimately, M-Sport decided to establish cooperation with Nav24 and implement a newer version of the ERP system - Microsoft Dynamics NAV.
Challenges
An important requirement for the new ERP system was the need for all business processes and financial operations take place within a single IT solution. This would allow real-time analysis of specific information, including financial data. Another significant requirement was a common database integrating all information in one place, available to individual departments, as it would allow immediate reaction to changes within shared processes. Additionally, the system was designed to automate as many processes as possible, which would significantly reduce wasted time.
M-Sport's management decided that the benefits offered by a cloud based ERP was too tempting to pass up on and in 2022 NAV24 was instructed to prepare an implementation plan for a smooth transition to a software as a service (SaaS) model in M-Sport Europe and the UK HQ. The main influencing factors for making the switch to a SaaS model were: heightened security offered, no need to purchase and maintain expensive hardware, faster access times, always up to date software and the ease of locating the UK and European operations on one cloud based server.
Timeline of cooperation with NAV24
2017 Upgrade of Dynamics NAV in M-Sport Europe
2017 Training of key users
2018 GoLive
2018 Service and Maintenance agreement in the UK and Europe
2018 Additional training
2022 Upgrade to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Saas) in M-Sport Europe
2023 Upgrade to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (Saas) in M-Sport UK
Benefits
The implementation of Microsoft Dynamics NAV, allowed for an increase in the efficiency of the company's operations and realised the vision of key business processes in one integrated system. The implementation translated into a number of benefits, which include::
- Obtaining full control over project costs by using the orders module;
- Integration with Microsoft Excel, which speeds up work by editing the data of individual files from the level of a spreadsheet;
- Simplified acceptance process from the "Purchase orders" tab and the ability to copy orders;
- Easy booking of resources for a specific order performed in a given project;
- Monitoring and maintaining appropriate stock levels thanks to the purchasing module;
- Accelerating the inventory management process through efficient labelling;
- More effective accounting control with external accounting registering documents directly in the ERP system. This provides the possibility of continual data analysis and significantly reduces the time of collection of receivables, allowing the company to maintain financial liquidity;
- Automation of the invoicing process, notifications and the possibility of preparing periodic statements and checking the customer's liabilities at the stage of the order being place
- More pleasant working environment with a user friendly, intuitive interface and search engine.
