Five customer stories, five quiet weekends
Western Computer has helped hundreds of companies move from Dynamics NAV to Dynamics 365 Business Central. No two moves looked the same. Industry, goals, and migration type all shaped the plan.
When Collins Equipment's server warranty was about to expire, their IT firm gave them a simple choice: buy a new server or move to the cloud. Collins has built and serviced tanks, pumps, and meters for the fueling industry for more than 70 years. They had run Dynamics NAV for a long time, so neither option was an easy call.
Collins chose the cloud. Our team moved their data and processes over a single weekend. Kaileigh Strizzi from their business development team sums up the result:
“We came in on Monday morning, and it was business as usual.”
Part of that is how familiar Business Central feels if you are coming from NAV. There was very little to relearn. Today their accounting, sales, warehouse, and field service teams all work on one platform. New features arrive every six months instead of waiting for the next big upgrade.
Heathrow designs, makes, and distributes lab equipment for research, clinical, academic, and government labs around the world. Their move looked a lot like Collins'. As NAV neared end of support, they switched to Business Central over a weekend and were up and running the next business day.
The bigger gains came afterward. Once Power BI was connected to Business Central, the team could see where their order process was slowing down and automate around it. Our team at Western also built a live inventory feed into their EDI system. Now customers can check real-time stock and place an order in one click. Mo Khan, their Senior Director of Operations and IT, put numbers to it:
“Analyzing the KPIs and the automated processes in Business Central allows us to decrease order processing time by 20%, and we increased our output capacity 15% without adding headcount.”
Heathrow was pleased enough that they later moved a sister company, also on NAV, to the same platform.
MWS carries one of the largest and most varied inventories of magnet and specialty wire anywhere. They had run a heavily customized NAV system since 2018. By 2023, they wanted to modernize accounting and distribution in the cloud without adding staff to do it.
Automating payables made the biggest early difference. Denis Goss, their CFO, explains:
“We saw immediate dividends from this. This process saves our accounting team between 10-20 hours a week, which is key since their bandwidth is already over-stretched.”
Selling wire is trickier than it sounds. One customer orders in feet, another in pounds, and another in kilograms. Business Central now handles 12 units of measure and does the conversions on its own. If someone tries to ship an order more than 10% over or under, the system flags it before it leaves the building.
Crimson looks after 1,000 acres of vineyards and seven wine brands, including Pine Ridge and Seghesio. Their NAV system was customized for the wine business and tied to separate add-ons for payables, bulk wine, and forecasting. Staying on-premises meant waiting about three years for each round of new features.
They moved to 365WineTrade, our wine industry solution built on Business Central. The two share much of the same architecture, so their data carried over cleanly and the team kept working without a pause. Kimberly Benson, their VP of Finance, has been through six ERP implementations. Her comparison says it best:
“The deployment of 365WineTrade was by far the smoothest. It helped that we were migrating from Dynamics NAV to another solution built on the Dynamics platform.”
Their integrations now fail less often. Their accounting team can also pull reports without exporting everything to Excel first.
Image Source, also known as the Swag Gurus, ranks in the top 1% of promotional merchandise agencies in the country. Their clients include Microsoft, Nintendo, Expedia, and Boeing. They had run NAV since 2008, and it served them well for years. Then Microsoft support ended and more of the team began working remotely. It was time for something newer.
Their move to Business Central finished on time and on budget, which any ERP veteran knows is not a given. An automated collections module now saves them about 20 hours a week. Each sales order can also be handled as its own project, which fits how they build custom merchandise for every client. Sheryl Williams, their VP of Finance and Operations, credits how the project was run:
“We have relied on Western Computer for 12+ years. They keep us involved in what's going on throughout projects, which allows us to stay on budget and on time.”
Every one of these companies had worked with Western Computer for years before making the move. That is eight years for MWS and more than twelve for Image Source. Because of that history, our team already understood how each business runs, from the warehouse floor up. We think that goes a long way toward explaining why so many of these cutovers fit inside a weekend.
It also reflects what nearly 40 years and 1,750+ implementations teach you: the quiet cutovers come from knowing the business before the project starts.
If you are still on NAV and wondering what comes next, we would be glad to talk. We will give you a straight read on what is worth changing, what is fine as it is, and how to get there without pausing your business. See how a move from NAV to Business Central could work for you here.