LD Products

LD PRODUCTS ACCELERATES ACCESS TO FINANCIALS AND STREAMLINES INVOICING 

COLLABORATES WITH WESTERN COMPUTER REMOTELY TO INTEGRATE DYNAMICS 365 FINANCE  

 THE SOLUTION 

LD Products has grown steadily over the years, and the demand for the company’s products took a quantum leap in 2020 when COVID-19 hit. As the majority of customer employees started working from home, and as students began to receive education services online, the need for home printer and office supplies skyrocketed. 

“To accommodate the expansion of our company, an effort was already underway to enhance our Microsoft Dynamics NAV ERP solution,” says Aaron Leon, the LD Products CEO who founded the company while he was in college in 1999. “During the pandemic, the need to produce financials faster so we could see all the numbers as each month progresses—rather than waiting until closing the books the following month—became paramount.”  

Another key requirement for LD Products was to streamline accounting processes, which were managed by a combination of resources working in the California headquarters and a satellite office in the Philippines. With NAV deployed on-premises, multiple VPN connections were needed to connect Philippines personnel to NAV. Given that NAV is resource-intensive, the VPNs proved difficult to provision and manage. 

“Because we had customized NAV extensively and were using it on-premises, we were also limited in upgrade flexibility,” points out Martin Micheelsen, a Project Manager at LD Products. “On-premise software tends to go through major upgrades on an occasional basis. We wanted to move to using an ERP platform in the cloud to take advantage of frequent upgrades that include the latest capabilities.” 

To begin the process of moving ERP to the cloud, LD Products first focused on the financial reporting and accounting aspects. The company turned to its longtime ERP partner, Western Computer, to deploy Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance. “We never considered working with anyone else,” Leon says. “Western Computer knows NAV and all of our systems that ERP connects to inside-and-out. Another company would have needed months to get up-to-speed.” 

 THE BENEFITS 

With the Dynamics 365 Finance implementation beginning as stay-at-home mandates went into effect, the internal LD Products IT team and the Western Computer team were forced to collaborate remotely. As LD Products worked on the integrations to feed sales, purchasing, warehouse and other operational data to Dynamics 365 via NAV, Western Computer made sure the Dynamics 365 endpoints were available with the correct data models so LD Products could set up the integrations. 

“This was a unique integration in that we only wanted to use the financial and accounting aspects of Dynamics 365 Finance,” says Troy Swanner, Senior Developer for LD Products. “Western Computer worked hard to make sure Dynamics 365 would expose data correctly, not only for reading files but also for saving file updates. And the way they handled the project remotely was impressive. It’s not as easy as when working together onsite, but Western Computer adapted to make sure the work got done.” 

Leon appreciates that he and other senior executives at LD Products can now easily and quickly access reports, including P&L, cash flow, the balance sheet, and financial ratios. “All of this used to be done manually through pivot tables,” Leon says. “Now, we get all the financial information automatically, and the ability to look at financials throughout the month makes it easier for us to react sooner to anything we need to adjust.” 

The LD Products management team quickly adapted to using Dynamics 365 Finance reports since the formatting and presentation are very similar to Microsoft Power BI, which the company uses for sales reports. And with the Philippines office now able to access Dynamics 365 in the cloud, invoicing and accounts payable also function more efficiently. 

“The way Dynamics 365 Finance is set up, it helps us make sure we follow accounting procedures correctly, such as cleaning up bank reconciliations,” says Micheelsen. “Before, our system gave us more flexibility in handling processes, and we sometimes strayed from best practices.” 

With Dynamics 365 Finance fully deployed, LD Products continues to work with Western Computer to further fine-tune the system. “And as we select a new warehouse management system, Western Computer will play a key role in integrating that solution with Dynamics 365,” Swanner adds. “They are a great partner to work with to make sure all the components of our ERP environment work well together.”