Project Management Solution to Support Product Bundling

Dynamics AX development case study

Company

The Company provides access and visitor management solutions to equip the railway stations, airports, parking lots, stadiums, and shopping centers worldwide.

Business situation

The Company offers the turnkey visitor management, ticketing, parking and other access solutions. Along with equipment, it provides software, maintenance, and other services for the systems.

Each of the solutions is unique and has to be tailored to the needs of each customer. Therefore, the Company manages most of its business operations through the Project management and accounting module. It needs to modify the Dynamics AX Project Management  functionality to control sales and maintenance of the equipment and software.

Challenges

The Company’s ERP had to support the following processes:

• Handle tangible (equipment) and intangible (software) items within a single order
• Track support and maintenance of the equipment sold to the customers
• Manage bundled products that include hardware, software, services, warranty, etc.
• Create invoices with the price structure negotiated individually with each customer
• Increase the supply chain visibility

Solutions

Axiopea built a project management solution on top of Axapta 4.0 functionality. When the Company decided to upgrade to Dynamics AX 2012 R2, the implemented functionality was transferred to the new system.

The functionality includes:

• Software license sales and renewals. The feature allows setting the time of license expiration and payment recurrence for any of the software products. The system sends notifications to both Company and customers when the license needs to be renewed.
• Support and maintenance of the sold equipment. We added the serial number dimension management capabilities for the sold items. This ability wasn’t provided by Microsoft until the Dynamics AX 2012 R3 release. The feature helps manage serialized products for support and maintenance purposes keeping track of all services provided.
• Service contracts management enable engaging 3d parties to provide warranty and repair services, plan and track their actions.
• Bundled products administration allows configuring multi-element orders within a single sales order. The Company can now easily manage hardware, software, and services within a project.
• Extended project invoicing allows presenting invoices to customers according to the negotiated pricing structure that they expect. The sales manager can show a single bundled price for all elements of the order or individual prices by the line items.
• Customer self-service portal customization. Dynamics AX Enterprise portal was modified to enable customers view information and order the Company’s turkey solutions.
• Supply chain interfaces. The solution imports transaction files from partners and processes those transactions within the Microsoft Dynamics AX (AIF Framework) and Microsoft BizTalk environment. This feature automates the sharing of data between the Company and its partners, such as external warehouses, service providers, etc.

Results

With Axiopea’s services the Company was able to manage hardware, software, and services as the turnkey solutions offerings, which is crucial to the Company’s business. Other benefits include:

• Improved customer care and relationships with partners
• Reduced supply chain transaction time and costs
• Decreased accounting errors
• Enhanced logistics

Today, the Company is present in 90 countries providing quality support services worldwide.

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