Mills CNC is the sole distributor for Doosan machine tools in the UK and Ireland. One of the country\u2019s fastest-growing machine tool companies, it sells and leases equipment to customers in manufacturing sectors including aerospace and defence, power generation and motorsport to oil and gas, medical, automotive and general precision components.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Dynamics Navision and 365 enterprise resource planning platforms are central to Mills CNC\u2019s day-to-day operations. \u201cNavision is used primarily by our finance and warehouse teams for accounting and invoicing, stock control and pre-delivery inspections,\u201d <\/em>says IT Manager, Birger Schaathun. \u201cIt\u2019s basically the bible for our customer accounts.\u201d<\/em> Synchronisation tools enable data sharing with Dynamics 365, which supports the company\u2019s CRM system. \u201cIt\u2019s all our customer data: contacts, sales leads through our website, emails and calls,\u201d <\/em>says Digital Marketing Manager, Steve Archer. \u201cAnd if we ever get a GDPR query, we can easily locate and export everything we have on a particular customer.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Mills CNC had been running Navision 13 for some time, but by 2017, it was clear that an upgrade was both necessary and inevitable. \u201cIt was coming to the end of its life and we knew we had to migrate to Navision 18,\u201d <\/em>says Birger. \u201cOur challenge was that we were using a non-standard version. Over the years we\u2019d made a large number of modifications, mainly for finance and accounting purposes, and these all needed to be transferred across.\u201d<\/em> Steve adds: \u201cWe also had to ensure that all the customer information was translated correctly and that the two systems would talk to each other as we needed them to.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Acora embarked on the migration project in September 2019; the new Navision 18 solution finally went live on 1 June 2021. \u201cWe had some internal issues here that caused delays; and then of course there was the pandemic. There was a lot of time spent writing and testing the modifications before we could go live. All in all it took about 18 months, but we got there in the end!\u201d<\/em> says Birger.<\/p>\n\n\n\nRE-TOOLING REQUIRED<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
TIME FOR CHANGE<\/h3>\n\n\n\n