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WESTERN PRECOOLING SYSTEMS GAINS NEW EFFICIENCIES, LIVE INSIGHTS, AND MOBILE FIELD
SERVICE ON A UNIFIED DYNAMICS 365 PLATFORM
Western Computer migrates legacy systems to the cloud with Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain
Management and Field Service
THE SOLUTION
Western Precooling Systems has a unique, complex and fast-paced supply chain serving customers in the agriculture and food industry. The organization manages multiple entities and a high volume of data across many cooling sites, internal inventory and equipment, perishable and high-value customer inventory, field service maintenance and repair, and financial operations.
After many years using Dynamics GP and a legacy AS400 system, the systems were challenging to maintain and had no path for improvements. A major issue was manual and disconnected data that caused limited visibility options across the organization. Field techs had to document time, parts, and notes on paper only to have the admin team re-enter the information into GP and papers were passed from desk to desk for management approvals.
Josh Miller, Director of Operations for Western Precooling Systems knew it was time to move to the cloud and integrate their technology. “We had tapped out on add-ons for GP and knew support was ending soon. It’s critical for us to monitor performance and make decisions in real time, not based on what happened yesterday, and we couldn’t get that live insight with what we had.”
- Eliminate legacy systems
Streamline field service
operations - Provide real-time insights and
analytics - Improve financial processes
- Integrate inventory and warehouse management
“We hadn’t done a system transition in 20 years and Western Computer had great ideas on how to help us even though what we do is very specialized. I was impressed by their depth of expertise across several applications and areas, especially warehousing, inventory, and field service.”
Josh Miller, Director of Operations- Integrated cloud platform to manage all aspects of business
- Optimized, mobile field service operations and processes
- Real-time visibility into financial and service performance
- Automated processes and workflows
“It was an interesting time to go live with our system during a pandemic but being in the cloud when it happened was a huge advantage. Our admin team could work remotely without having to VPN in and could do everything digitally instead of on paper.” Josh Miller
- Dnamics 365 Finance
- Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management
- Dynamics 365 Field Service
- Power BI
“Western Computer did everything I could have asked for in a partner. They listened, adapted, and did what they said they would do. They
understood our business and end goals and gave us a great solution.”
THE BENEFITS
Western Precooling Systems is very happy with the optimizations and insight delivered by Western Computer. Automations were created in financial processes and instead of transactions posting in batches as they were in GP, they now have real-time transactions and get up-tothe-minute visibility. Multiple entities can be managed with ease and templates help create new legal entities quickly.
Field service is now completely mobile with offline capabilities so techs can enter information directly on their tablets, not paper, with no duplicate entry required by admin staff. Field techs also save a lot of time preparing for a service call because they have access to the full history of a piece of equipment where before someone would have the tedious task of printing everything out on paper “Our techs having information available digitally on site on their tablets allows for improved efficiency and accuracy across the field, in purchasing with inventory, and in the office,” says Josh.
Service orders have a multi-stage processing and approval process that were previously all paper based. Delays were a challenge due to waiting on documents and a lot of printing, scanning, emailing, and mailing hardcopies between offices. Now approvals are fully digital and automatically triggered upon completion by the techs. Managers and executives can approve on any device at any time and identify where bottlenecks are happening.
Western Computer used Power Automate to build several workflows to eliminate human errors and establish controls such as preventing service orders from being prematurely closed and ensuring SKUs are entered properly and not duplicated.
Power BI has transformed reporting and decision-making for Western Precooling Systems. With GP, staff had to export data from a SQL database to Excel and manually create reports that could be outdated by the time managers received them.
With Power BI, they can monitor and analyze performance throughout the day. Data is centralized in Microsoft Dataverse and easy to consolidate from multiple sources in visual, interactive dashboards. Users can access the insights they need on demand to make fast and proactive decisions.
“It’s easy to filter and drill-down into our data on dashboards instead of reading spreadsheets. Managers can analyze the metrics they care about and filter by their customers in a click of a button. We are 100% confident in the integrity of our data now and the decisions we can make,” Josh happily reports.
With complex inventory requirements, Western Precooling Systems appreciates a much easier and flexible way to manage and control inventory across multiple warehouses within Dynamics 365. “We can locate anything at any time whether it is in a warehouse, in the field, or on a service vehicle and have full traceability now,” explains Josh.
Security was also a prior concern as well with users having access to everything. Dynamics 365 provides centralised, flexible security management to establish user controls and permissions by role, business unit, or other criteria.
Western Precooling Systems has a solid foundation for future growth with Dynamics 365. In addition to the ability to scale on demand and enjoy automatic software updates vs. more upgrades, they have found a partner in Western Computer they can depend on for ongoing improvements, support, and advisory.
ABOUT WESTERN PRECOOLING SYSTEMS
Founded in 1942, Western Precooling Systems helps growers and shippers across the Western United States and beyond get fresh produce to their customers. Recognized as an industry leader, the organization provides cooling services at over 100 sites, ships product for customers, and manufacturers, leases, and services their own equipment including their innovative HydroVac™ system.
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