BCX Field Services (BCX FS), formerly CEB Maintenance, was established in 1987 and specialise in offering third party maintenance to Point of Sale equipment and related peripherals for a majority of South African retailers. Servicing approximately 70% of the domestic retail sector, there are 14 branches across Southern Africa, all 100% owned by the BCX Group.

The motivation to upgrade from Dynamics NAV2009 to NAV2017, was centred on enhanced mobility. The improved mobility features allows BCX FS’s 180 concurrent users to leverage new functionality and address BCX FS’s unique business process requirements. Other benefits included improved decentralised processing capabilities resulting in the reduction in terminal server licenses, improved ease adoption of the application, and enhanced web service integration capabilities.

The Challenges

Due to poor regional connectivity, use of terminal server technology was a necessity.

Dynamics NAV2017 presented an attractive alternative as its’ improved decentralised processing capabilities, resulting in the reduction of the number of terminal server licenses required.

BCX FS’s need for additional mobility support and ease of integration with divergent customer environments further motivated the upgrade.

The Solution

Just Dynamics introduced an integrated Dynamics NAV2017 system to handle BCX FS’s unique business requirements:

• The service management module was made use of to handle the maintenance side (call logging and recurring/ad-hoc billing).
• The Jobs module was used to handle the installations side of their business and it is integrated with service management to facilitate the automatic creation of the asset base for billing purposes.
• Web services have been made use of to facilitate customer integration (allowing customers to automatically log incidents directly in NAV and receive status updates as the calls are attended to).
• Furthermore, web service integration was also used to facilitate mobile integration, allowing technicians to make use of mobile devices to process calls that are received from NAV. Stock is then used and consumed by engineers on their mobile devices, thereafter the results are replicated back to NAV.

The following modules were used:

• Microsoft Dynamics™ NAV 2017 Service Management
• Microsoft Dynamics™ NAV 2017 Jobs
• Microsoft Dynamics™ NAV 2017 Inventory & Warehousing
• Microsoft Dynamics™ NAV 2017 Sales & Receivables
• Microsoft Dynamics™ NAV 2017 Purchase & Payables

About the rollout

The upgrade project took place over the course of 6 months and was initiated by means of an end to end business analysis to ensure that all interactions with Dynamics NAV2017 were thoroughly documented. This formed the benchmark against which the project was measured.

A comprehensive flight plan was established upfront, with regular internal and external project meetings to ensure all parties were adequately made aware of the projects progress.

Key users in each department were nominated by the business, and were then extensively trained on the use of Dynamics NAV2017 together with an understanding of the new application benefits.

To cater for remote branches, the BCX FS’s internal NAV administrators were trained to provide introductory training to end users. They then travelled throughout the region to conduct training. Training flowed directly into client user acceptance testing (UAT), ensuring that key learnings could be practically applied by the users.

Internal test scripts were created and documented by each department, and the ability to fulfil these test scripts was the measure used to determine go live readiness at a departmental level.

Motivation in choice of solution and vendor

Just Dynamics were responsible for originally implementing NAV2009 within CEB Maintenance in 2011. As technology forms a central part of their Business, CEB were looking for a product that would facilitate future growth and allow them to take advantage of new technologies. Accordingly now as BCX FS, they wished to leverage the established relationship and intimate knowledge that Just Dynamics has of BCX FS’s business, making Just Dynamics the logical choice to perform the upgrade.

Benefits

Greater automation of repetitive functions resulting in improved efficiency.

Customers are now able to directly log and track incidents with BCX FS via their own internal call logging platform.

Just Dynamics developed functionality to automatically select the most appropriate resource to close a call reducing their travel costs and time to close.

The asset base is automatically maintained during the call fulfilment process by the technicians themselves. This is catered for by means of a PDA based solution which enables the technician to record all aspects of the call (replacement details, mileage, time onsite, etc.) and replicate that information back to Dynamics NAV2017.

Dynamics NAV2017 provides improved scalability which expedites regional deployment.

Job function specific role centres have facilitated enhanced ease of use resulting in faster adoption of the product for new staff.