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For over 30 years, Hawkins Watts has helped to develop some of Australia and New Zealand's most successful food, beverage & nutrition products. Faced with an ageing Dynamics NAV ERP, they wanted a solution that provided a secure and streamlined way to manage their business operations. Dynamics 365 Business Central proved the ideal choice.
Business challenges
Hawkins Watts was operating on a legacy Dynamics NAV system, which was fast becoming outdated. In particular, the invoicing functionality faced impending deprecation. There was an urgent requirement to invest in an upgrade.
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Selecting Dynamics 365 Business Central
Hawkins Watts had an existing Microsoft ecosystem – including CRM – and had invested heavily in this to benefit their customers and suppliers. It was logical to select Dynamics 365 Business Central as their new ERP, strengthening and future-proofing their Microsoft ecosystem.
Immediate business benefits
Instant data visibility and improved operational transparency were two major post-implementation benefits. Debbie Hawkes, IT Systems and Process Manager, comments on the upgrade experience as a whole:
“The project ran extremely well. We were very focused, as we knew we had a deadline, and we knew some functionality may not work as expected. I take my hat off to the Theta team. They hit the necessary milestones and dealt with challenges along the way.”
Debbie was also impressed with the go-live for a business-critical system:
“I’ve heard horror stories from go-lives, but ours went extremely smoothly. We went live over the weekend, and by Monday, it was all working.”
As with all cloud solutions, the system has continual upgrades. Debbie shares her experience with handling these:
“The Theta team communicate well about Business Central upgrades. They’re always prepared to work through any issues we might have.”
Paper to digital transformation
An impressive aspect of the project involved transforming paper forms into a digital format.
Food industry customers require Hawkins Watts to send a Certificate of Analysis (CofA) with every Lot Number of product delivered. Previously, the warehouse printed and attached a paper copy to the shipment.
A Power Automate process enables these documents to be auto uploaded from SharePoint into Business Central, and the CofA is automatically emailed to the customer the night before the sales shipment is delivered.
As well as saving time, this ensures the CofA isn’t misplaced during transit or within the customer’s warehouse.
“With around 1100 Item transactions per month and approximately 2 mins per item to find, print & attach the CofA, the new digital functionality not only saves paper, but also saves our warehouses at least 40 hours per month.”
Additional functionality
‘Add-ons’ have further enhanced the system, giving Hawkins Watts even more capability and customisation for their business-specific needs. They include Continia for automated invoice processing, Power BI for custom reports and dashboards, and Lanham for demand planning. Hawkins Watts also uses Theta’s Dynamics 365 Business Central Excel Importer extension, which allows them to quickly import large multi line invoices as Excel files, which then enables more accurate financial reporting.
The future
The next step is to improve forecasting for customers and vendors, streamline costing processes, production capacity planning and routing, and ensure CRM integrates perfectly with Business Central.
These efficiency improvements will ensure Hawkins Watts can continue as a market leader.
