Dunster House

Leading UK manufacturer/retailer of garden buildings increases efficiency and turnover by replacing Sage with NAV.

The Business Need/Challenge

In 2005, after 11 years of establishing the business, Dunster House took the opportunity to expand their manufacturing facilities in line with demand. They started production in Eastern Europe while growing the UK administration and customer sales teams, as there was a massive opportunity for them to become the market leader in their field. It was at this point that they realised their existing solution, Sage 50, did not have the functionality or scalability to meet their current and future demands.

Dunster House required a solution that would allow them to operate in real time over multiple sites in the UK and Europe. With the rapid growth there was a need to increase the number of users on their existing accounting software, which had already surpassed the recommended user limit. There was also an increase in the number of transactions running through the system, which put an additional strain on the software, causing it to rapidly slow down and on occasion crash. These issues would set their administration team back days in productivity and result in under-performing customer SLAs.

The main reason for the review was to find a solution that would help to improve and streamline processes, in order to give employees more time to carry out their main tasks. Also, with a paper-based system there was an increased likelihood of inaccurate data, increased costs and wasted resources.

The Solution

The company quickly recognised that they needed to replace Sage 50 and it became clear that the growing Dunster House operation required an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solution. As part of the review process, the Dunster House project team considered a variety of solutions, including Exchequer, Chaos and Sage 200, along with Microsoft Dynamics NAV.

Since migrating to Microsoft Dynamics NAV the company has doubled its turnover to £20m and more than doubled its workforce.

The Benefits

The combination of Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Qi Limited proved to be the perfect combination. With years of working with manufacturers, distributors and assemblers, along with an in-depth scope of the project, the partner was able to understand the issues Dunster House faced. With this knowledge and approach the partner was able to deliver a solution that perfectly met the brief but also had the flexibility to increase functionality, number of users, individual user requirements, and support customisation to future-proof Dunster House’s initial investment.

Microsoft Dynamics NAV allows the company to have real time views of all operations, including orders and payments received, to ensure that workflow is controlled and products are delivered to customers on time. An increase in collaboration between departments has been seen, with improvements in efficiency and productivity leading to more satisfied customers.

The new system has helped streamline the business processes. Less time spent entering duplicate information to multiple systems and searching for information in various databases (accounts software, Excel, CRM) has increased efficiency. This has resulted in the company seeing a significant reduction in the time a project takes to be processed, from order-taking to delivery/build, leading to an increase in orders and demand.

The company also use Microsoft Dynamics NAV CRM and by integrating this with their ERP, it allows their large sales team to have visibility of the orders they have generated and where they are in the project cycle at any stage. As a result, this has seen increases in their customer service standards.