Premier Analytics recently worked with a Washington, DC-based global non-profit from their on-premise hosted Microsoft Dynamics NAV to the latest version of Microsoft Dynamics Business Central on the Microsoft Cloud.
The non-profit works with partners in the health sector and has offices in 28 countries in Africa, South America, Asia, and the Caribbean (where our technical team had initially proposed to be based during this delicate operation).
The customer’s Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central system enables them to track all their fund accounting and operations reporting, manage their grants and subgrants, and support procure-to-pay activities by country.
Microsoft Dynamics Upgrade Scope
All modules(Finance, Grants, Procurement) were in scope for an upgrade of custom functionality and integrations to Salesforce and their data warehouse and analytics tools.
The upgrade was carried out in a single phase starting with custom functionality updates and rewrites where required. Careful code inspection was carried out, and several application areas were replaced by newer functionality. Our team had previously analyzed new functionality that either replaced existing functions or demonstrated specific areas to the customer for their consideration; equally, a plan had been made to switch to the latest features with business continuity in mind.
For the data migration phase, an initial run was carried out once the application upgrade was complete; this step created a UAT (testing) database that the global testing teams(key users) accessed and carried out scripted tests to confirm their processes worked as expected. Our team made corrections based on feedback from the testing phase.
When the testing phase was completed, our Microsoft Dynamics Upgrade team began the final version (Dynamics NAV to Dynamics Business Central) upgrade version and finally began the company’s data migration to the Business Central Cloud. This phase was carefully planned to ensure minimal business interruption, with the customer electing to have it carried outside and done outside their key reporting window.
Microsoft Dynamics Upgrade Challenges
With the number of countries to be upgraded, data volumes were challenging, with nearly 100 million rows of data converted across multiple versions and finally migrated to Business Central Online.
The customer was previously on Microsoft Dynamics NAV version 2017, meaning we had to migrate across 4 versions to get to the latest version of Business Central. Each data migration step took up a considerable amount of time, with all mini steps needing to fire perfectly to avoid any issues down the line.
Why Upgrade to the latest Microsoft Dynamics Business Central?
Connectivity Issues
The customer was concerned about providing better connectivity for their global users. The previous solution was on-premise, which saw them incur high costs to maintain their infrastructure and its associated periodic updates and upgrade fees.
Specific regions had connectivity difficulties in the Washington DC data center. All users now have the same optimal experience with minimal downtimes experienced thanks to the Microsoft Cloud.
Software upgrade costs
Where the customer would be required to budget for new ERP migrations every 3 to 4 years will no longer apply because Microsoft Dynamics Business Central is built on a new extensions-based platform that separates Microsoft standard and other custom functionality to allow seamless updates without affecting specific custom functions.
The customer is on the latest versions and enjoys new features deployed every 2 months or so, as well as the introduction of hotfixes and other minor changes with minimal involvement from our software development and support teams. These updates are applied on weekends and do not affect normal business processing.
End of Mainstream Support
There are multiple other benefits that the customer has recorded after their transition, it must also be mentioned that their previous Microsoft Dynamics NAV version was reaching the end of mainstream support, and the customer needed to migrate to continue enjoying the benefits of Microsoft support, including access to free updates and hotfixes.
Premier Analytics‘s solution architects have over 15 years of development, design, and implementation expertise in Microsoft Dynamics solutions and can walk your organization through planning for the next version. We offer free scoping and assessments for organizations using earlier versions of Microsoft Dynamics ERP for clients within Africa.
Planning for an upgrade of your ERP solution or a migration to the cloud? Contact us for more information and take advantage of our free upgrade assessments.
