“It was incredibly uplifting to work with a partner who is as invested in our business as we are. We want to sincerely thank the team at PA for their involvement with Wolters.”

Erin van Diemen, Financial Controller, Wolters.

The Organisation:

Wolters Steel, Mesh & Hardware began business in Frankston, Victoria, in 1976 with four staff in a shop providing steel and hardware to the building trade. The motto of “If we haven’t got it, we will get it for you” has stood the company in good stead, seeing them expand into fabrication and a variety of project work including domestic, commercial, and light industrial.

Their head office is in Carrum Downs, Victoria, with a second location in Mornington, Victoria.

The Need:

To date, significant investment has been made into the IT infrastructure of Wolters. The organisation spent many years utilising Microsoft Navision as their ERP system, upgrading to Microsoft Dynamics NAV in 2009. The decision to continue on the Microsoft ERP journey with the update from Navision to NAV came after extensive requirements gathering and a review of alternative products in the market. The implementation of NAV into the business was designed to achieve the following aims:

• To effortlessly store useful business information.
• To allow the seamless retrieval of useful business information to support business decision making.

The Solution:

In July 2021, Professional Advantage (PA) was engaged by Wolters to propose a migration path from their current Dynamics NAV solution to Dynamics 365 Business Central. Their existing version of Dynamics NAV had reached end of life and was no longer supported under Microsoft Mainstream Support. Therefore, this upgrade to their ERP solution was intended to meet the current and future needs of their organisation. More importantly though, it was the desire of Wolters to become a “cloud company” and take advantage of the complete Microsoft stack.

Their decision to engage PA as their partner was highly influenced by prior working relationships they had with current members of the PA Business Central team.

“The ability of PA's consultants to seamlessly recreate enhancements from our legacy ERP system into Business Central was another huge factor in deciding to ultimately partner with PA.”
Erin van Diemen, Financial Controller, Wolters.

Furthermore, whilst the out-of-the-box Business Central solution catered for the majority of their business needs, the complexities around their inventory recording and management has always been a challenge.

Wolters also wanted to leverage off the integration with Microsoft Power BI to improve their reporting capabilities and provide real-time insights into business performance from a financial and operational perspective.

The Results:

Wolters went live with Business Central in June 2022, one year after their initial engagement with PA. The commitment and dedication of Wolters’ financial controller together with PA’s consultants and the project management team ensured a smooth transition to Business Central.

“We would like to take this opportunity to sincerely thank the team at PA for their involvement with Wolters over the course of our Business Central implementation. The project ran seamlessly from start to finish which reflects the dedication and commitment to client service that PA has. It was incredibly uplifting to work with a partner who is as invested in our business as we are.”
Erin van Diemen, Financial Controller, Wolters.

Familiarity was also a key component in the successful go-live of Business Central. Whilst the look and feel is substantially different from the NAV platform, the underlying structure and concepts made it easy for staff to transition.  

Throughout the design and consultation process, care and attention was taken to identify the need for any enhancements to the platform. However, as is often the case, some operational requirements were not identified until post go-live.

“These enhancements were quickly documented, developed, and tested by PA with accuracy, ensuring timely release into the live environment minimising the impact on Wolters’ operations.”
Erin van Diemen, Financial Controller, Wolters.

Since the completion of the Business Central implementation and their active use of the solution, Wolters have experienced benefits in areas including daily receipting; the daily receipting of customer payments had previously been a very arduous process in their legacy ERP system.

“The implementation of Business Central has improved this process beyond expectation. The time required to carry out the daily receipting process has halved, allowing the accounts team to invest their time in other areas of the financial reporting process.”
Erin van Diemen, Financial Controller, Wolters.

Business Central offers the functionality for Wolters to complete simple and real-time receipting of payments which, along with some specific enhancements to the system, ensures customer account balances remain up to date.

Business Central’s integration with Microsoft Outlook has also provided significant efficiency gains for Wolters. Prior to Business Central, the monthly send of customer invoices and statements was an entirely manual process: individual invoices would be printed to PDF, saved, and emailed to the customer along with their statement. Historically, invoices were only sent at month end.

“This is now done solely through Business Central with such ease that we are now doing weekly send outs. This change in process, driven through the implementation of Business Central, has had an enormously positive impact on cashflow.”
Erin van Diemen, Financial Controller, Wolters.

The Future

Following the improvements to their processes and systems that they have experienced as a result of the Business Central implementation, Wolters see the future potential and opportunities of the solution, including:

• More efficient use of Outlook integration to Business Central.
• Better use of communication through Microsoft Teams.
• Order pick and dispatch displayed on large monitors in the factory.
• Moving Wolters to a “paperless” environment.
• Development of SharePoint for client facing information such as safety sheets, and for document repository.
• Investigation of better use of Business Central CRM for marketing to keep clients updated on changes, promotions, etc.
• Investigation of B2B web portal using Shopify as the transport into Business Central.
• Review of how Business Central is being used, what is still being done outside of the system, and recommendations on how to make better use of Business Central.
• Utilising Power BI to provide real-time, accurate business performance analysis on finance and operations.